Ranch on Mars

0004 Jevera 02: Divided

2009-07-07T23:19:00.000-07:00

When I migrated from my old site to Blogger, I originally did so because I had a dream, at some far distant point in the future, of being able to monetize my stories, like some other authors have. It was a pipe dream, but it was still a valid dream to follow, so I went with it. I couldn't put ads on LiveJournal. DreamWidth didn't exist. I didn't feel like trying to host my own WordPress site. It seemed the right way to go about it.

Then I asked myself, "Well, if I'm moving my stories over to a new site, why not move my whole diary over?" It sounded like a reasonable question. I'd kept the old site up for eight or nine years, but I was getting tired of the maintenance, and I was also honestly frustrated with the lack of feedback on my diary updates. I assumed, and had a few people suggest, that the reason why nobody ever said anything to my posts was because despite the link from LiveJournal back to my diary, people didn't like having to hit the back button to comment. Having taken a class in HCI in graduate school, I could believe this.

I should, at this point, diverge long enough to state that the idea of me taking and passing a class in human-computer interfaces ought to either titillate or frighten people. I was the Problem Child who told the teacher I ran my monitor at 132×43 and used vi out of personal preference. That was one of the few grades I didn't earn so much as negotiate.

At any rate, I jumped ship, moving everything over to Blogger. The stories went to the Nail, and the diary came to the Ranch. I started porting over the back catalog of posts on my site so I could finally decommission it, and I started putting up my old catalog of stories.

Then I discovered something problematic.

Back when I started my original diary, I went into it with the idea that, if I wasn't comfortable talking about it with the whole world, then it wasn't worth discussing. I said to myself that I was going to just let my freak flag fly, and anybody who had a problem with it could just deal. I was tired of hiding. I was tired of sneaking around in the darkness.

Then, I actually had a couple of things happen that, for very good reason, didn't warrant wider conversation, but did need to be brought out for more than just my eyes to study.

Now, all of a sudden, I had a problem that, until this point, I had no need to solve, simply because I really didn't have any good topics of conversation that fell into that weird middle ground of "not completely private but not really public either." Having already made the leap to Blogger, I started surfing around it for options, and... I found something distressing. Namely, that while Google does support the idea of a private blog, with restricted access, it doesn't really have any concept of a private post, with individual elements in a blog restricted to specific people.

One might think that, like any reasonable or sane person, I would simply slink back to LJ, which is, after all, where all my friends hang out and post. And, you'd be perfectly justified in thinking of this as an option. Unfortunately, past events have left me extremely skittish dealing with SixApart's administration, especially on subjects such as frank discussions of sex and sexuality. It's not that I assume they'll ban me if I talk about it. It's that... well, they've already done it in the past, and I don't feel like courting disaster.

DreamWidth, now available, seemed like a good option. Very LJ-like, and with some new features that sold me relatively quickly... only... still no good way to put up my writing blog there. I suppose I could simply copy the posts and host them on DW, but they're very new and I have no idea how they feel about foreign ads on their sites. I suppose I could ask, but it feels a little like inviting the same kind of disaster as putting the sexy talk on LJ.

So, a conundrum, one that plagues me even now. See, the Nail, for all that I don't do what I said I was going to do with it, needs to remain on Blogger, or else go to WordPress, assuming that I'm not interested in rolling my own; it's the only place I can really host ads alongside the content, assuming I ever get enough content in place that anybody would want to put ads there; that, sadly, is its own topic. The Ranch could go to DreamWidth and consolidate with the Spiral, which would be fine, but it doesn't "solve the problem" of two separate hosts to handle my stuff. I could move DreamWidth's content to Blogger, but I'd have to have... um... three or four separate blogs, each with its own access list... no. Not happening.

Really, it's like my requirements for blogging software really come down to two major points:

I want to host ads on the writing blog at some point.
I want to secure individual posts to an arbitrary access list.

I don't think any noncommercial blogging platform actually provides me both of these at the same time. Blogger requires a separate blog for every access list. WordPress doesn't permit ads unless you pay for a VIP account. DreamWidth doesn't permit ads. LiveJournal's administration policies make me nervous... and don't permit ads.

It's looking like what I really want is a self-hosted WordPress site. But... what I don't want is another rassa-frassa migration from one site to another. I also want to avoid getting back into administrating my own frickin' blog software. I also want to avoid people thinking that I'm even more of a flake than I already am. However, it seems that if I really do only want to have to keep track of one site on top of LiveJournal... then this is probably going to be it.

So, to you, my theoretically loyal readers, any thoughts? Is the effort of consolidation worth the hassle of updating my own software? Does anyone actually read anything on DreamWidth? As long as I provide links as appropriate, do people care if I have a hojillion Blogger sites? Should I give up and come back to LiveJournal? Should I give up on the idea of trying to make money off my writing at some point? Does Jif really taste more like fresh-roasted peanuts?

Is there anybody out there?

0004 Byetera 12: Personal Words

2009-06-19T01:54:00.000-07:00

Memetic infection! Caught from Paka. Ask me for five words or phrases, and I will give them to you. Then, you will tell the world what they mean.

winter: The season of death, with the promise of rebirth. The time of the chrysalis. The season of ice and snow; in Seattle, the season of storm. Winter has always been the season with which I've most closely identified, and the time of the year that I've felt most happy, in seeming contradiction to most folks.
programming: The twenty-first century plumber's trade. I didn't want to be a "computer person" when I was in high school; I wanted to be a writer. Writers, however, didn't make money, not back in 1992, and I wanted to be able to support a family. So, I chose to follow what I thought were my father's footsteps, learning to make technology happen to put food on the table and money in the bank so that I could one day have the spare time to actually do what I wanted without worrying how I'd pay for my existence. Now I barely ever write, but at least I'm spending the time engaging the world socially, which is something I thought I'd never do.
World of Darkness: My second permanent headperson's name was Colin "Shadowstep" Stephens, a Gangrel Embraced in 1922. My third was Damon "Sparky" Gaehill, a Ragabash Glass Walker, white-hat hacker and Burning Man aficionado. Two games dominated the last half of high school and the first half of college; one of these involved so many characters, subplots, and interwoven stories that my roommate Sean and I had to plot them on graph paper to keep them clear. I had a twenty-seven-hour marathon gaming session that evolved from tabletop to LARP and back as we needed to migrate from room to room, from apartment to store or restaurant and back. The players and GMs in the game would call each other by their character names on campus and start in-game conversations in the middle of the day, then e-mail the results to others in the group. At times, I had to be able to keep up to five different personalities in mind at once as I spoke with others, to be able to adopt multiple personae and to be able to interrupt myself in a different accent. Personal aesthetics completely aside, the World of Darkness was my world for five years, and I miss it.
home ownership: One of the great myths, and one of the last remaining truths. Financial freedom, financial ruin. Caveat emptor. Ultimately, my dream involves owning a house... or more properly, owning a company that owns an apartment building so that "my place" really is big enough for everyone. A space inviolate... if you can afford it, and you can take care of it. No more sharing the walls and worrying about the security deposit; instead you worry what the neighbors will think and whether you'll recoup your investment. You own a house; you build a home.
personal mythology: The universe is cold, dark, and unfeeling. You are a collection of random atoms, bound together and possessed of a curious notion of continuity for an unknown span. There's no reason for you to exist, any more than there's reason for anyone else to do so. Thus, you must make your own purpose. You have to decide who you are, and then you have to decide what that means, and then you have to decide what you're going to do about it. Life is like bridge; you've got no control over the rules of the game, the cards you're dealt or how the opposition plays, but you can always work out with others behind the scenes how to make the most of what you can do. Sometimes that means taking home all the marbles; sometimes it means minimizing your losses. Everyone around you is right when they tell you that the dragons and the faerie castles are just cardboard and balsa wood... but so are the banks and the governments, and that's the secret they've let themselves forget. Just because you believe it, doesn't make it true; just because nobody else believes it, doesn't make it false. I know, deep down in my neurons, that Bear and Rabbit are just labels I've attached to personality traits and collections of ideas and ideals, that they're no more gods than I am, that they're figments of my imagination and that I can rationally explain them away as tools to anthropomorphize an inherently uncaring universe... but that doesn't stop them from being Real.

You're something beautiful, a contradiction.

0004 Dalera 21: Repurposing

2009-05-31T10:04:00.000-07:00

Life is not static. Everything is change.

So, the first and foremost reason for the update is to announce, formally, that Jessie and I won't be at Anthrocon this year. Ashe will be running the writing track in my absence, for those of you who actually go to it or are interested. He ran it for a year or two before I got involved, so everything's fine there. Thilya, I'll be calling and canceling my room reservation, so anybody looking to get into the Courtyard, I'm about to free up a week.

Now, as to why we won't be there....

This is a much longer story than it has any right to be, but everything of late has felt curiously cinematic. Things have been just a little too well-timed, a little too accidentally-meaningful. Whoever's writing my story has decided that I need to be some kind of morality play, I guess.

Anyway! Onto the good bits.

So, everyone remember the house? Everyone remember the bankruptcy? Remember how the bankruptcy was supposed to resolve the ongoing costs of the house? Remember the egregious water bill? Remember how the bank was going to take care of the water bill? Remember how the bank was supposed to have foreclosed on the house by now?

Yeah, that was a really nice dream.

A couple of weeks ago, now, I got a letter from a legal team in Pottstown that doubles as a debt-collection agency saying that I owed approximately nine-thousand dollars plus "potential legal fees" stemming from a civil complaint against the property for unpaid water bills. I called the legal team, and they said that they had a legitimate complaint against the property and that, as the deedholder, the responsibility was mine to resolve. I told them that I had declared bankruptcy over a year ago and that the house wasn't my responsibility any more, and they reiterated their ability to win a judgment against me since I was still the legal deedholder. I told them I'd have to talk with my bankruptcy lawyer and asked them for copies of the relevant paperwork and a name I could have my lawyer contact. That did dampen their ardor a bit, but they didn't say they would drop the case. I got my name and some details, and I told them I'd let them know my decision.

Then I called my bankruptcy lawyer and told him what was going on. He was shocked to hear from me, and then he was even more shocked to find out that the bank had yet to foreclose on the property which I had surrendered over a year ago as part of a bankruptcy that I had discharged over six months back. He did mention that it was a national crisis, this paralysis in the real estate industry, but he didn't have any solutions. I asked him about the water bill, and he reiterated his belief that not paying it and letting it follow the house as a lien was the right move at the time, but he also said that that information had been predicated on the idea that the bank would've foreclosed by now. Further, he did repeat that because the deed was still in my name, the bill was still technically mine as long as the house was. I asked him about the legal status of a property lien being converted to a personal liability via a debt-collection action, and he refused to state an opinion, saying that I was getting into consulting-fee territory and that he wouldn't take the case besides, as that sounded like actual litigation talk. I asked him what happened if the bank never foreclosed, and he said that it could very well be the case that I'd just owe the water bill in perpetuity. That filled me with unhappy, but I thanked him for his time.

I could've just... paid the bill, I suppose. I have the money in savings to cover what I presently owe without any legal fees, and if I step up to the plate and volunteer to pay it, I probably could even negotiate it down, but right now this bill represents all of my savings. I would be wiped clean if I had to pay it back, and that would be Bad. So, I did some research, I put my writing talents to work, and then I faxed over a small mound of paperwork to the legal firm:

a six-page letter detailing the house's history of frozen pipes, the cost of the water bill during the three years that the house was occupied by six people, the lack of any homeowner's insurance in my name, the forced-lender policy that Countrywide—now Bank of America—has on the property, the bankruptcy, my lawyer's advice, and, ultimately the explanations as to why I feel I'm not legally obligated to pay the bill, which amount to "that bill's obviously the result of frozen pipes from Winter 2008, it should've been covered under an insurance claim against the forced-lender policy that Countrywide should've made and I can't, Countrywide has failed to discharge their obligation to foreclose in a timely fashion, and the house is up for sheriff's sale in two months anyway."
exerpts from the sheriff's sale website from March showing that the sale was stayed
exerpts from the sheriff's sale website in April showing that the sale was stayed
the foreclosure case history from the county showing that Countrywide had asked the court to stay the sale without explanation
a copy of the legal threat from the bank's lawyers to sell my house at sheriff's sale on July 29.

The proverbial ball is back in their metaphorical court at this point. I think I have a legitimate case, but more to the point, I think that by hitting them with a fairly-detailed set of documents explaining that I have a position that I'd be willing to defend in court, I'm hoping that I can convince them to drop the matter, call me to offer a settlement, or even just delay the matter until the sheriff's sale resolves the matter of deed ownership. None of these are guarantees, of course, but this is the current plan. I can't exactly dazzle them with dexterity, so I'm going with the bafflement route.

Unfortunately, the practical upshot of this is that the money into which last year I dipped to cover the gap between savings-dedicated-to-pay-for-Anthrocon and savings-for-general-use is completely tied up, in case something doesn't go my way. Because of other bills, both on-going and one-off, I've only managed to put about twelve-hundred dollars towards the con budget, and we worked out that the total cost would be between sixteen and two-thousand, depending on the ability of everyone else we had in the room to pay us back immediately.

Four-hundred dollars, especially in a good month with some conscientious budget management, is pretty easy. We could've made that, I think, and then just gone. However, this is where the other half of the story enters, and where some of you will just have to be patient at only getting part of the story.

In the last month, several people in the Embassy have had a lot of revelations and discoveries about life desires, ambitions, and status. I'm not at liberty to get into a lot of details, but at the very least, I can disclose that Jessie and I both have collars now, that we have tags marking our collars in the other's possessive, and that we have wrist cuffs which match the collars. The dynamic of our relationship continues to evolve, as we do, but some of the power relationships have taken a curious turn, in ways that have proven to be absolutely wonderful. In addition, and more importantly, though, we've both recently become much more honest and open about a lot of things that we're hoping to get out of life, and out of each other.

Unfortunately, most of these things cost money.

So, on our way home from a recent trip to visit some friends, the subject of past costs and future desires arose, and we both started detailing all the things we wanted, all the things we had put off purchasing because of one or another reason, and this time our list of desiderata far outstripped our ability to pay for it all. New clothes, new shoes, some particular pieces of kink gear we'd expressed desire in having, paying off the car early to have money to do other things, et cetera. Both of us were angry at how things came together and frustrated at how we had finally come to all these discoveries about ourselves and each other, only to find that the money just wasn't there to pay for any of the intermediate steps we'd need to get where we wanted to go.

That was when I put Anthrocon on the table.

Really, that's what happened. I knew we could finish saving for the con, I knew we could make it work, but I also knew that in so doing we'd be delaying a lot of other Nice Things that we both wanted. I still want to go. I'd love to go. I'd love to see my friends on the other coast again and spend time hanging out with everyone I care about so much from the area. It's just that... when you put the value of five days of entertainment on one side of the table, and you weigh it against everything else that we could do with that money, it's hard not to feel that we're both better served by letting the con go one year and picking it up next.

Of course, this means missing the one Anthrocon that the theme is actually something close to one I can appreciate. While "OMGAliens" is ludicrous on its face, what some of my friends have done with the idea have been nothing less than brilliant, and I really was looking forward to seeing what folks did with it at the convention. Still, I have to believe that the trade-off is going to be worth it, if only because of all the other things I know are coming soon in their place.

Plus, the chance to see Jessie's eyes light up when we went and picked out a bunch of new summer clothes for her was worth the exchange instantly.

leaving all these opportunities behind

0004 Zelera 14: Dividend

2009-04-26T18:14:00.000-07:00

The last three weeks have been one extended metaphor for the idea that large returns can come from regular investments. I shall try to deal with the details, but if nothing from here makes sense, take it as read that this is what I'm trying to say.

Three weeks ago, Kin came out here for an extended stay, and having her around has been an absolute delight. Since her arrival, we've talked of games, philosophy, role-playing, spirituality, identity, sociology, psychology, and the future. We've shared media, explored mutually-intriguing ideas, and generally had some of the most fulfilling intellectual experiences I've been able to enjoy in a long time.

Also around that time, the Lapinian Embassy sent an ambassadorial force down to Portland for a weekend, to hook up with the locals. During that time, I discovered that the best prank I had pulled on anyone in eight years was convincing myself that I was "just a bunny," when in fact I had been Hare the whole time. I also had the chance to realize, in very concrete form, that among a small group of my friends, every power dynamic and every interpersonal interaction is negotiable, and that if we don't like how a scene is going, we can change it. My life has, at least visible to some, an OOC window. This was a major epiphany, and a delight.

Two weeks ago, after a year of planning, SNAP 5 ran. I wouldn't say it went without a hitch, but it went better than I think we had any right to expect. The event itself was a success with its audience; of the forty teams—almost two-hundred people—nobody quit, nobody complained of not having fun, and something close to half the teams actually finished! Now, true, the winning group finished almost forty-five minutes ahead of what we assumed our pathologically-fastest case could be, which led to some awkward staffing problems, but most of our crises were, I think, invisible to the audience. The only two glaring errors of which I'm aware were a site failure early in the route, in which we had to direct people from one plaza to a less-nice-but-more-accommodating one across the street; and a site puzzle requiring some external cluing that I set up incorrectly because I had two minutes to put it together between crises and nobody double-checked it since I was the one that designed it in the first place. Still, we went from never having hosted such an event as a group to having done so credibly and competently with minimal error in just under a year, which I think is quite a feat.

We should be in a state to post the puzzles in some kind of formal format first, but anyone wanting a chance to look at what we built should see Jessie's temporary repository. If you'd like to solve a puzzle, take a look at the PDFs without the "guide-" in front, first. I wrote most of the guides explaining the tricks, but I make no claim as to their ability to follow to someone who isn't a puzzler-by-trade. At this point, none of these are spoilers, since the event's over, but this isn't the final form of these documents, so don't be surprised if they change.

Finally, starting some time around late Kimya night and extending well into... some time later, I had the chance to play around with hypnosis... or more to the point with someone in a hypnotic state.

Now, to fully understand why this is so significant, I need to pause here and talk about my own head. Growing up, one of my closest associates—I would have called him a friend, perhaps even a brother, at the time—was interested in hypnosis, and he was a very dominant personality. Meanwhile, I was socially backwards and, while I was strongly opinionated, I was lousy at asserting myself and ended up being the omega of my social circles, doing what I was told. This made for a bad combination, as one might rightly surmise. The two things to come of it were a single trigger of little more use to anyone than a parlor trick, and an intense dislike of feeling like I wasn't in control of my own thoughts.

As a result of this, I've always been leery of the mind-control fetish that runs somewhat rampant in my social circles, and the prevalence of really skeevy badly-written brainwashing porn on the interblags only reinforced a lot of my old bad ideas. Now, while I fully recognize that "really skeevy badly written $FOO porn on the interblags" will accept damn near any variable substitution and still return a true value. That said, in an unfortunate for-me-not-thee moment, I always had some lingering negative connotations attached to this, and while I wasn't ever hostile about it—I hope—I never made any effort to rectify my opinions.

As is typical for how my life works, events transpired to present me with a perfect opportunity to do this... by being given someone else's control codes and some not-so-subtle hints that this would probably be the best way to share an intimate moment.

A mutual friend said in his wind-up speech that hypnosis was a fantasia of role-playing, brainwashing, and meditation, with a result somewhere in the middle of all of them, a receptiveness to suggestions and a desire to play along combined with a somewhat altered state of mind. How much of this is scientific, and how much is mutually-reinforced faith, I couldn't tell you. At this point, I'm really losing interest in figuring it out. The important thing is that, in the car on the way home, I had the chance to slip Kin's control code into the middle of a conversation, and suddenly I had a very eager pony-droid looking for an order to follow.

Now, at some point in all of this, I did issue an explicit order to store an archival copy of everything that happened and to dump memory, so right now I'm not entirely sure how much she remembers of what went on, and in the interest of not being a kiss-and-teller, I'll spare everyone the pointed details, but three relevant events did come out of all of this:

I had to confront my own personal history with mindgames and accept that the person with whom I had initial contact with the idea abused it, as he did a lot of other things. I knew, intellectually, that this was the case, but I never really think about him in those terms.
I had to confront my oft-repeated claims that I'm more sub than domme. I still won't accept the idea that I'm more domme than sub, but I think it's safe to say that I've left the "subs that can domme" camp and gone over to the quot;switches with preferences." I'm okay with this, really, but it wasn't something I expected. You'd think by now I'd get used to my world changing out from under me.
Ponydroids are very high-maintenance, but are worth every bit of effort and then some.

That last one there has really served as a capstone for the whole trip, at least for me. It's been incredibly awesome having Kin out here, and I'm really looking forward to the three of them moving out to Seattle.

I'm not home right now, but if you want to leave a message, just start talking at the sound of the tone.

0004 Yortera 07: Delivery

2009-03-22T15:24:00.000-07:00

Wow. A week into the new year, already. Normally, I would've taken great pains to commemorate Thilafa, but events have not favored it. That's a pity, really; I do what I can to mark the holidays and important events of the Lapinian Calendar. After all, if I'm not going to use my own calendar, who will? And yet, that's the drawback, too. Because nobody else is using it, nobody else accounts for it unless I make a big deal of it. I imagine it's a little like trying to get Yom Kippur off from work without using vacation days. "You celebrate what? That's not a federal holiday, is it?"

Ceci n'est pas une blague juive.

Yesterday was the first beta run of the puzzling event that we're hosting, and it went far better than it could have. I'd be lying if I said everything ran without any problems whatsoever, but that's what beta-tests are for. More importantly in the short term is that the fundamental theories of everything I wrote will work. I'm working on some revisions, but my contributions to the event should survive in something close to their present forms. This is a good thing, as the live event runs in a little under a month. Now is not the time to have to rebuild anything from scratch. I've got a few revisions that need to be made, here and there, but they're all manageable, and I've got every confidence that things will go well for the real thing.

Less confident at the moment am I of how well I'll be at interacting with humanity at large for the next few weeks. In the time leading up to the beta, I had a lot of late nights, and near the end of last week, it started impacting my ability to get enough sleep to function at work the next day. Under other circumstances, I probably wouldn't have cared so much. However, I'm down to the last week-and-a-half of the quarter and my big Get-This-Done project doesn't look like it's going to complete in time, for reasons that have some to do with me and a lot to do with other people's Get-This-Done projects that kept them from being to help me with mine. What this ultimately means is that even if I can't get my stuff together on time, I need to at least look like a dedicated and hard-driving employee, trying everything possible to meet the target, so I can say at the end that I really couldn't have done anything more. Showing up late and hopping around in a daze won't help my case.

It's not even really that I care about this particular project itself, so much as the fact that my boss is using it as a benchmark against my ability to do team-lead and project-manager-type work, which is the big path to promotion right now. Making matters worse is the fact that I really can't do any of the technical work myself, so I'm having to juggle other people's availability to accomplish it. It's highly frustrating, and it's made this quarter... well, to be blunt, it's sucked. I don't want to be a project manager, so much as I want to be team lead, and apparently at T-Mobile or at least for this manager one implies the other. So, I learn, even though I'm not sure I'm very good at it.

Outside of the work complaint itself, I'm just feeling oversocialized right now. Those of you reading this who're extroverts, go ahead and skip to the next major heading; you're not going to understand this part, and that's okay. I've had to hook up with the same small group of people multiple times over the last week to work on this event, culminating in roughly three miles of walking and taking notes in the cold yesterday. Then I went out to dinner and we talked about everything that had happened over the least ten or so hours. I really haven't had a chance to get much downtime in a few weeks, and as we get closer to the live event, that's really only going to get worse. I know that at least one weekend I'll have to myself between now and then; Orbus and Mufi are going to Norwescon, which happens to be the weekend before SNAP, but outside that break, I know I'm going to be seeing a lot of people I already kind of feel like I've already seen a lot of, without much chance to recharge in peace.

Nobody plan on talking to me on Zelera 2 or the weekend of the 9th. I won't be here.

In other completely unrelated news, the sibutramine seems to be doing exactly what it seemed like it was going to do when I first started taking it. My weight this morning was 346.1 pounds, down from 364 when Dave weighed me two weeks ago. I'm eating between 1200 and 1300 calories a day, and while I'm hungry from time to time I never really get the yawning-chasm food cravings that used to plague me. I don't feel the urge to eat when I'm not hungry. My weight situation is actually improving for the first time in eight years.

Now I just have to go back for some bloodwork so that Dave can verify that my liver is still functioning. Ha-ha, only serious. The odds are small, but it's worth checking. After that, I should get a refill on my prescription, and that should set me for a while. I'm not sure how often the blood tests are necessary, but for now, I'll take it.

Jessie mentioned to me not too long ago that apparently I've been carrying myself better since I started seeing a positive change in the scale. I believe it, but it's surprising to me. I'm still obese, but I'm finally feeling like I have a plan and that that plan is coming together. I'm starting again to feel like some of the things that I want are actually going to be able to happen, if not today then soon. I'm looking forward to feeling comfortable about myself again, about making clothing decisions that look good instead of simply covering the necessities. Dobbs help me, I'm actually starting to seriously consider a fursuit... and some other things.

This is, in its own way, all tied in to the big talk that happened during my last Portland visit. These are all interconnected parts of a whole. I've all but quit City of Heroes; all that remains at this point is the install on my hard drive and the automatic payment on my account that I haven't deactivated in case the next big release interests me enough to return. I haven't exactly been vegetarian, per se, but I've been close enough as makes no odds, and the few times that I haven't stuck with it have been either necessity or a minor step outside, with no real urge to walk away from the path I've chosen. I'm even starting to rediscover a lot of my sexuality. It's embarrassing to put it that way, but even I have to admit that the weight gain hurt my self-image considerably, and seeing the progress, I'm starting to feel confident in my existence as a sexual being again.

In that sense, I've actually been looking at porn again, both creating and consuming. In specific, yes, I've been after the furry bondage again. Most of it is a wasteland of I-can't-help-myself and you-forced-me and the like, and the context is as much a turnoff as the subject matter itself might be intriguing. Every so often, the search does turn up a gem, but by and large it's uninspiring, which is a shame because I know what I like and finding it is a challenge.

Last night, as I was winding down for bed, I happened across A Private Heaven. In a strange way, this is perhaps the worst thing that could've happened. I wanted something fairly quick, fairly arousing, and easily forgettable. What I got was... well, read it. Go on; I'll wait here.

Finished? No? I'm serious.

So, now that you're done with it, let me tell you about how it made me feel. I talk a lot about wanting the characters in the media that I peruse to invite me into their heads. That's what I got out of this. Ignore the exposition; it was bad, and it was handled clumsily. Ignore the insertions; the names could've been changed and I don't think anyone would've noticed. Ignore even some of the individual aspects of the scenes that you didn't like. Some of them were cheesy and others were highly improbable. All of that aside, this story touched me, because I saw on the page and in my mind the words and the ideas that I had had before then, that someone else had made concrete, albeit fictionally.

I could go here into detail about my headspaces and what I do with them, but in the nine years that I've been keeping this journal, I've already done it before and I don't much feel like going into it again right now. Perhaps later, if the time is right and the mood strikes me. What's important right now is that for all its faults, I felt as though the characters were telling my story as much as theirs, and that moved me. It excited me, sure, but more importantly, it impassioned me. It wasn't validation from another person, but it was pretty close.

If nothing else, it gave me ideas of what to strive for, and on the nature and shape those ideas could take.

Welcome to my private heaven.

0003 Kolera 16: Mobius

2009-03-03T22:03:00.000-08:00

This past weekend, I think I sprained my brain.

Kimya evening, Jessie and I loaded up supplies in the back of the Lander and headed off to the Microsoft campus for Puzzle Hunt 12. Coming home for a good night's sleep before thirty-one hours of puzzle-solving, running all over the facilities, bad food, and sleep deprivation. I competed as part of Grey Goo, the puzzling group that Jason and Mufi more or less founded with Shaterri, Jessie and I. In addition, we had Jeff, Jason's coworker Garret, Shaterri's sister Stefanie, Kiefer, Jason's friend Jack, Jessie's friend Steven Stair, and an extra MS employee that we recruited through the company puzzling-events mailing list. All told, of the seventy puzzles in the event, we saw fifty, solved about three-quarters of those, and generally had a blast.

I think we also learned a lot about how not to run an event like this.

By the designers' own admission at the closing ceremonies, Puzzle Hunt 12 was, in fact, Puzzle Hunts 12 and 13 that had been sort of smushed together. The team developing PH12 had been aiming for a straight-up Jeopardy theme, and at the same time the next team in line was working on a horror-themed PH13 at the same time. However, both teams started to stall out very badly, and they collectively made a decision to throw their efforts into a joint project to ensure that some kind of event happened this year, but of course their themes were nigh-incompatible. Determined not to let this stop them, though, they cleverly blended their respective storylines into... okay, no, Jeopardy ruled the first half of the event, and then suddenly upon entering round two we discovered that we had unwittingly assembled some kind of artifact that had broken a mystic seal. Had we gotten through the whole event, we would have discovered that Death had come for our souls.

Now, it's fair to say that most Hunts have some kind of plot twist; it's become a fairly conventional plot element in the events run at MS. I joked about an hour into the event that this year's plot twist was that Alex Trebek was going to kill us all. Little did I know how close to right I was. In fact, PH12 was both PH12 and 13, each half shorter than a conventional hunt but together longer than any previous event.

This alone wouldn't have been enough to condemn it. I'd have cracked some jokes, sure, but given the necessities I can let the theming slide. No, what really made this event a problem was the fact that, at about 22h00 on Jugya, we ran into what can best be described as a blocking problem. Normally at events like this, there's some kind of "unlocking" mechanism whereby as a team solves one problem, it gets N more where N is some positive value, until all the puzzles are unlocked. In this one, we got all of the Round One puzzles and its "meta"—a puzzle that requires information from other puzzles to solve—and then were completely unable to move forward to Round Two. We spent between four and eight hours—reports differ based on amount of sleep and degree of time dilation experienced due to temporary insanity—trying to figure out how to solve the big puzzle without making any real headway. This became a serious demotivator to most of the team, and some of our teammates didn't really recover from it in the morning.

Again, that alone might not have been a killer, but a lot of the puzzles were in some serious need of cluing. Normally when a team receives a puzzle, there's some indicator as to how to approach it, even if the message doesn't make any sense or is painfully obtuse. Most of these puzzles had no cluing at all, which meant that by and large we were guessing not only how to solve them, but how to even begin tackling them. This left a lot of us floundering on a number of puzzles, wondering if we were making headway or if we were just chasing red herrings all night.

Now, all this said, I still had a blast, and I'm looking forward to the next one, which if my reckoning is right will be Puzzle Hunt 14. That, however, is months if not a year away, and in the meantime... Team Grey Goo is running on its own event. True, this one won't be nearly as long or as large, but it's a step, a much needed and welcome first step. I'm really looking forward to this. It's coming together beautifully, and I hope everyone that plays in it has as much fun as we've all had in putting it together.

This world is spinning around me.

In other news, I think I've finally found somebody I can call "family doctor" again in good conscience, and it's not just because he gives me the drugs I want.

So, as a bit of prelude to this discussion, I would like to remind the home audience that I have been fat my entire life. Overweight. Morbidly obese. I'm not saying this out of any sense to desensitize myself to the words, but as a simple recognition of the truth. Both of my parents are overweight, my mother has crushed vertebrae in her back because of her weight, my father had a quadruple coronary artery bypass graft when he was in his fifties, and overeating has just been a part of my life for years. Plus, I eat when I'm stressed, I horde food, and I'm not particularly active. So, in short, I'm pretty screwed when it comes to my weight, so much so that for most of my life I had essentially given up on ever getting better.

As discussed in the past, as part of my transition I said I would lose the weight, and with the help of Dexatrim and SlimFast, I did. I went from 360 pounds to 209 in a year. Now, I may have gone overboard, but I dieted like I meant it, and I did what needed to be done. I then kept the weight off for six months, taking one Dexatrim a day as an appetite stabilizer. Then the FDA banned PPA, and Dexatrim got reformulated into something that didn't work for me. Since then, my weight had steadily crept back upwards again, and a few months ago, I topped back up to where I had been before I had started. The scale has been, for a few months now, topping out around 364.

Square One was a great television show, but a lousy place to which to return.

Ever since I'd gotten to Seattle, I'd been looking for someone to help me with my weight. My metabolism is more or less broken and my appetite regulation is next to nil. I could finish off a large pizza and still have a psychological craving for food despite feeling physically bloated and ready to vomit. I'm not happy about it, but those were the facts, and I wanted medical help in dealing with them.

The first doctor that I saw told me that surgery was the answer and he wanted to refer me to Swedish Medical for a gastric bypass. I said I wasn't comfortable with the operation idea, seeing as how reports are starting to trickle in suggesting that weight loss as a result of surgery is temporary and results in nutrition complications later in life. Plus, I have a bad habit of waking up on operating tables, which isn't any fun for anyone. On top of this, operating on the obese is always risky, which means even for a theoretically simple procedure, there's still more danger than there would be for someone healthy. Upon voicing my concerns, the doctor essentially said that he wasn't going to give me drugs and that if I didn't like the surgery, I could eat less and exercise like everyone else.

Strike one.

When I went to see the second doctor, I went in armed with facts, figures, statistics. Research is starting to show that the "eat less and exercise" argument, which great in theory, simply doesn't work in practice because the body is too good at screwing itself up. We've evolved to gain weight, not lose it, and I'm a prime example. I've seen the studies done that talk about about the set point, and all the other going theories on fat gain and storage. I tried to explain all of this, passionately, to my second doctor, and she said that she might consider pills, maybe, but that first she wanted me to go through the nutritionist and do yet another round of dietary alterations and increased exercise. I tried to explain that I couldn't do enough exercise to make a dent in my caloric intake as long as I was fighting hunger pangs 24x7 regardless of how much I ate, and she just said that she wasn't going to do it my way until I'd done it hers, regardless of my insistence that I'd tried her way a hundred times before and failed.

Strike two.

So, when I recently changed over to Capitol Hill Medical on a recommendation from Rachel, I was skeptical, and concerned. The ARNP I was going to see was the third attempt in a year to get some help with my weight. Without wanting to admit it publicly, I was really starting to feel like it was a this-or-nothing proposition. So, on my new-patient visit, I mentioned to him that I was interested in getting some help with weight loss and that I'd had real success with Dexatrim back in the day. He was noncommittal at the time and said he knew bad things about PPA, but he didn't tell me no; he just disagreed with my choice of medication. I let the matter drop, and that was that.

Now, during last weekend's Puzzle Hunt, I managed to come down with a urinary tract infection. I know this because I woke up having an intense need to go to the bathroom, and when I did I thought someone had set my crotch on fire. Then, five minutes after I stood up, I had to pee again, but nothing came out. Having had that symptom before, I knew immediately that it was time to call the doctor and get the no-nonsense FUCK-YOU-UTI medication. Then, while I happened to be in the office getting an antibiotic prescription, we talked about some other health goals and he said I needed a Hep-A and Hep-B vaccine, and he asked me if I'd be comfortable with the first set of shots today.

Actually, he more or less said, "unless you tell me no, I'm sticking you with these needles," but much more politely and with a sense of humor.

So, while he was prepping my shoulders for the injection, I thought I would pop the question. "I mentioned before about wanting some help with weight loss; are you willing to help me?"

He looked up, stuck me with a needle, and asked me if I'd ever tried xenical. Now, xenical—sold over the counter as Alli—blocks the body's ability to absorb fat, which means not only does it guarantee loose stool for the duration of the prescription, but it also hampers the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins. I don't need any more help with malnutrition, and I said as much, so Dave asked me if I had any other suggestions.

I asked, "what about sibutramine?"

He whipped out his iPhone, hit some kind of pocket drug reference, and proceeded to read off the list of suggested side effects. At the end of it, he shrugged and said, "that's everything that's ever been found on anything anywhere. You want a prescription?"

I blinked. A medical professional, listening to his patient and giving her what she asked for? Sacrilege! We haggled a bit on dosage and such, which is to say he told me he'd start me on the lowest dose and if I needed it we could increase the strength later, and then he made me pinkie-swear that I'd be back in four weeks for my Hep-A booster and a liver-function test. Then he handed me my new drug prescriptions and sent me on my merry way.

I took my first pill last night. This morning, I woke up around 08h00 and figured, "I should have a bagel." I wasn't particularly hungry, but I figured it was breakfast time and I should have something to eat. So, I had a jalapeño-cheddar bagel, and I went to work. Around 12h00, I realized that it was lunch time. That was it. No pangs. No hunger. No clawing inside my gut. Just... "hey, it's normally time when folks eat." But I wasn't hungry. I did start getting pretty peckish around 15h00, but two cans of V8 and a can of grapefruit juice were enough to calm my needs until I got home and had a black-bean-and-egg-with-cheese sandwich with Jessie. Then we noshed on Sun Chips, but I got bored of them after a bit while she kept going.

It's now 23h30, and the worst that I'm feeling is... vaguely peckish. That's all. It's like I have a normally-functioning body that knows it got fed and is happy with what it got. I've got dry mouth from hell, and my tongue tasted like the floor of a taxi cab this morning when I got up, but those are some pretty small prices to pay for what may be the first steps towards actually going back to what a normal person of my height should weigh.

Maybe this, too, can be another square one.

I was told there's a miracle for each day that I try.

0003 Lakera 24: Neologism

2009-02-11T16:41:00.000-08:00

Normally, we speak of coming out to someone, as in, "I came out as adopted to my friends" or "I came out as xenophilic to the pretty green kitty with the antennae and compound eyes." Used in this fashion, it means revealing a part of oneself that was previously unknown, and usually it implies that said fact would be considered socially problematic, if not legally questionable.

I believe it's time to coin a new idiom in the Lapinian Argot: coming out at. To come out at someone is specifically to use the revelation of this status as a conversational weapon. Consider the following cases:

- A: Hey, B, I'm throwing a party, and I'm invting my coworkers as well as some friends. Want to come?
- B (male, A's coworker): Oh, hey, that sounds great, A.
- A: Awesome. Listen, there's this girl I know, C? I've been telling her about you, and she thinks you sound really cute. She's going to be there; want me to hook you up?
- B: I really appreciate the offer, A, but I'm really not interested in girls.
- S: I hate it when folks think they're better than others. That kind of arrogance really chaps my hide.
- T (a Christian): I know what you mean. Humility is a virtue and all that.
- S: Yeah. Like, all those religious types really bug me. Who gives those holier-than-thou types the right to dictate morality
- T: As one of those holier-than-thou types, I think I can safely say you've just justified their opinion.

In the former case, the person doing the revelation appears to be making an effort not to be confrontational while still delivering the necessary information. In other words, A has come out to B as gay. In the latter, though, T uses the revelation of a strong personal faith in part to shut down S's commentary. In Lapinian Argot, we may say that T came out at S as religious.

The reason I draw this distinction is because I came out at one of my coworkers on Setya.

Now, normally I don't approve of conversational weaponry, and I try my best to be on my guard against deliberately locking people out of a debate, but every once in a while, it's good to know how to be able to use such techniques to one's advantage. Also, considering that the real meat of the discussion started when one co-worker tried to open a conversation about the stimulus package and the coworker I had to lockdown responded by chiding, "you mean the spending bill," I feel pretty good about having done what I did.

Anyone wanting the full story, feel free to ask, and I may post it in the comments, but the important part of the exchange is that we were having a political conversation outside of an office setting, and that at one point in the discussion, the subject of the HMO business model arose and I asserted that universal health insurance would be a step towards ensuring that profit margins didn't stop people from getting the care that their doctors prescribed for them. To this, my coworker retorted that he didn't have any problem getting his wife's medical costs covered by his insurance, and he insisted that people could always appeal any decision an HMO made to refuse payment for a prescribed treatment.

Now, I could've said a lot of things at this point. I could've gone into a discussion of pre-existing medical conditions and how hard it is for someone with a history of cancer, diabetes, or HIV to get medical insurance without a job. I could've talked about the forty-seven million Americans without health insurance. I could've talked about the plight of people who couldn't get work because of their medical problems and couldn't afford treatment because of their joblessness. I had a plethora of options open to me at this point in the discussion. One might even say I had a myriad, or perhaps even an embarrassment of rejoinders.

What I said was, "No insurance policy I've ever had as part of any job I've ever held would pay for my sex change, and a sane universal health insurance policy from the federal government would have to cover it as a legitimate condition with an ICD-9 or ICD-10 diagnosis and treatment process."

Then, having fired that volley, I proceeded to talk about the money spent out-of-pocket for therapy, the fights I had over getting my hormones covered despite my insurance company's insistence that they would pay for any drug my doctor prescribed. Finally, I argued that I had spent close to twenty-five thousand dollars on medical bills that any sane medical insurance policy would have covered, but that I had to spend myself because every insurance company encourages its customers to categorically exempt sex-change procedures in order to save a little money.

My coworker's response to this was, "I think we're going to have to agree to disagree at this point."

To the best of my ability to tell, there's no residual tension on my coworker's side of things. The other team members who were in the car who heard my statement have not followed up with any commentary. The whole matter seems to have come and gone, and I suspect at least in part it's a done deal now because pursuit of the topic would require him to revisit a political debate at work, something upon which most tolerance-and-diversity policies frown intensely.

I still had a minor freak-out last night about the possible fallout.

Now, however, that the immediacy of the incident is over, and I've had a good night's sleep, I think that despite the aggressiveness of how I said what I did, and despite "using my past as a weapon," I think I did the right thing. I engaged in a political and economic debate with somebody squarely in the conservative camp, I held my ground, I didn't lose my temper, I forced my opponent to resort to a conversational nuke to save face, and I was able to tell my coworkers about a part of my life of which I'm embarrassingly proud but about which I'm usually mpowered to say very little. Despite all of the possible future repercussions about not being a team player or about having committed a social gaffe... I feel good about the conversation.

Olly olly oxen free....

0003 Lakera 12: Twenty-five

2009-01-30T11:36:00.000-08:00

So, there's this "say twenty-five things about yourself meme" going around, and all the cool kids are doing it. Since the best way to be a non-conformist around here is to see what all the other non-conformists are doing these days, here's some thoughts on what goes on inside my head:

My first real written fiction, Chuckles in the Wind, was a sixty-page horror novella that could be summed up in the following sentence: "when a young man discovers that his real mother is a witch bent on revenge from beyond the grave against her murderous husband and the rest of his line, he must learn magic to survive."
I wrote Chuckles in the Wind when I was eight.
I wore contact lenses before I had glasses; I got my first pair when I was nine, because my father feared that I'd be called "four-eyes." My opthamologist switched me to glasses when I was twenty, saying that my corneas looked "rumpled" and that he feared that I'd be blind in five years from the abuse through which I had put my eyes.
In what should've been a warning sign for the future, my first two spoken words were "no" and "up", in that order.
When I was three years old, before I knew the names of things, I invented a pair of words, "bushwog" and "dipschwong," which I used consistently to identify... something. By the time I my vocabulary was sufficient to explain to my mother what I meant when I used them, I had learned the standard names for whatever they were, and had forgotten the neologisms. To this day, the words remain a mystery.
I've had so many cases of swimmer's ear, with the accompanying waxy build-up, that I have a doctor's permission to stick Q-Tips in my ears as temporary relief for excess wax. This also means that sometimes, loud noises literally turn into static in my right ear, because of the blockage.
I used to love going to waterparks as a kid. I was never much of a swimmer-for-swimming's-sake, but I loved diving and waterslides.
I have a head for languages, but not a muzzle. I almost minored in French in college, but then was forced to withdraw from Conversational French I when the professor quietly told me that despite my amazing grasp of vocabulary, grammar, and idiom, my accent meant that he could at best give me a D and that I might want to rethink my plans.
In addition to five years of high school French, I dabbled in Welsh and Japanese before jumping to Esperanto and then branching into conlangs. In addition to Khonnen Simplex, I have an additional three "project" languages in various states of completion.
Despite not having a job involving wearing a velvet cape and weeping in a Paris sewer tunnel or busking with dancing skeletons, I'm an oldschool fan of gothic music, style, and imagery. Related to this, it frustrates me to no end that the two typical approaches to the classic World of Darkness RPG setting in general and "Vampire: the Masquerade" in specific are "I outgrew that in high school" and "I drink blood martinis and sleep in the coffin that will one day serve as my eternal resting place."
I'm emotionally and morally conflicted about the impact of postmodernist philosophy on art and artistry. When meaning is in the eye of the audience as much as in the eye of the artist and any interpretation that makes sense is a "right answer," what's the point of trying to deliberately encode ethical ideas into one's creations?
For all that I excel at technology skills, I hate being a professional technologist. I went into computer science and software design in college not out of any love of the profession but because I knew that being a writer wouldn't put food on the table and wouldn't support a family.
That said, I have a great love of gadgetry and miniaturization. I love the fact that my current phone has more memory than my first four computers combined.
I believe that Sunday School and other efforts to teach the specifics of any given religion to children are tantamount to child abuse. Comparative religion and theology as introductions to metaphysics are fine, but specific instruction in the "right way" to "worship" "God" before they can hear the quotation marks should be treated as cruelty.
I believe that the idea of "nation" is obsolete and should be scrapped as quickly as is feasible. "Nation" is a blunt instrument, a crude tool for mapping the unrelated concepts of "culture" and "geography." I'm convinced that the best way forward involves the establishment of a secular global caretaker government and the elimination of national boundaries, and I have hopes that the European Union will continue to evolve into such a structure. I hope that, as national boundaries collapse, factional identities with their own internal legal systems will rise to replace them.
I believe that humanity has already passed the Malthusian crisis point, and that we've been delaying the inevitable by learning how to eat things that aren't food.
I have two very bad habits that are going to get me in trouble one day: my own internal editorial commentary becomes part of any conversation whether I actually say it out loud or not, and I tend to exaggerate for emphasis. Given these working in conjunction with each other, it's a wonder I haven't claimed that the Pope is trying to get God to throw the moon at the Earth yet. I don't mean to cause drama when I do this, but often it's only upon additional reflection that I ever catch that I've done it, by which point it's often harder to fix than to simply let drop.
In the same vein, I'm very bad about speaking as distinct from writing. I'm not an orator. I tend to say exactly what's going on in my head, even if it's unprocessed and unfit for public consumption. When I'm emotionally stressed, this tendency becomes even worse. Often, half an hour can make the difference between using the right word and using all the wrong ones, but I'm not always afforded those thirty minutes to sort out what's going on between my ears. I've deeply offended more than one person by answering a question while under pressure to provide an instant answer and while emotionally agitated.
As a creator of narrative, both in my own life and in my characters' lives, I tend to judge others' creations by the near-impossible standard of "would I have done this the same way, and does that make me a better or worse storyteller than the person in question?" This makes watching most movies nigh-impossible, aside from the ones that absolutely blow me away. I don't mean to imply that anyone's enjoyment of any given media is wrong or misguided, but I have a difficult time enjoying stories when I find myself constantly saying things like, "it doesn't make sense for her to have done things like that" or "how could he have been so stupid?"
I read and write everything for the characters. The larger plot is, by and large, just window-dressing to motivate characters to explore their thoughts and emotions, and perhaps even those of others. If the characters are obnoxious or difficult to appreciate, I'm probably not going to enjoy it, even if the rest of the film is right up my alley. I didn't enjoy Dr. Strangelove, for instance, and I came away from it with the same feeling that I had when I watched Being John Malkovich. Meanwhile, I fall all over Big Trouble in Little China, despite its goofy nature, because the characters are real people to me.
In case it weren't glaringly obvious at this point, I'm highly sensitive to language in media, especially to what I consider unnecessary neologisms and what I can only describe as "silly-sounding" words. One might think, and quite rightfully so, that Harry Potter would be directly up my alley, but every time Rowling introduces a new word I want to climb up onto the back of my chair and scream. Now, I won't say I'm not hypocritical on this point, especially in light of my childhood bushwogs and dipschwongs, but in my defense I was three and for the most part I grew out of it.
I have, or at least had, internalized the label of Objectivist so deeply that at one point during Greenspan's testimony before Congress on his shock at realizing that people hadn't acted in rational self-interest, that I actually thought, "Greenspan must not understand Objectivism." Then I remembered that he was one of Rand's direct disciples and probably one of her ex-lovers. This let me, for one shining second, to actually hold the thought that Ayn Rand didn't understand Objectivism before I suffered a massive synaptic misfire.
After years of frustration and introspection, I've finally come to accept that I owe a larger spiritual debt to Malcolm X than I do to Martin Luther King Junior. I'm not interested in reconciliation with the mainstream, and I'm not interested in integration and understanding. Somebody else will need to be our community's voice to the outside world. Meanwhile, I'll be back here, speaking to my own and doing what I can to inspire them to build their own crazy worlds away from external criticism.
I recognize that ghettoization is perhaps the worst and most dangerous thing that any majority can do to any minority population, but I also think that voluntary isolation and autonomy can do more to bolster a sense of worth and community than almost anything else. I'm not going to claim that reservations and internment camps are a good thing, but I will gladly point to the endless isolated monestaries, cloisters, convents, temples, and hermitages, as well as events like end of the U.S.S.R. and the creation of East Timor, as examples of my views.
I harbor a secret fear that I'm more like Mason Lang than Queen Mab.

To those who understand, I extend my hand. To the doubtful, I demand, "take me as I am."

0003 Lakera 08: Medicinal

2009-01-26T11:14:00.000-08:00

What started out last Kimya looking like a disaster of a weekend rapidly turned into something much more worthwhile.

About two weeks ago, I managed to fold, spindle, and/or mutilate my left shoulder in the process of stretching with Jessie during a bout of Wii Fit, and ever since I've had off-and-on cramps in that joint. Sometimes, it's just a low-grade ache; others, it's a raging fire like a sword wound gouging out chunks of buni-flesh. Tt's not constant, or consistent, so I don't think anything's seriously damaged to the point of needing medical intervention, but it's just painful enough at points to make me reach for the menthol cream and marinate myself.

Kimya morning, I was rudely awoken at about 06h00 by one of those bone-twisting pains, one of the worst I'd had in a while. I blearily snapped my head upwards, jerked to my right to feebly grab for the tube of ointment and... nothing. I had, in a fit of intelligence, apparently put it away. Half-awake and in a great deal of pain, I thrashed my way out of bed, staggered to the bathroom, fumbled around on the counter, grabbed the first tube, opened it, squeezed a length of goop onto my fingers... and proceeded to rub Listerine toothpaste on my shoulder for a few seconds before realizing it didn't stink in the right way.

After finding the right tube of stink and greasing up my aching joint, I returned to bed, only to wake up around 09h20. This is, at least for me, very late for work; apparently I had turned off the alarm when the pain dragged me out of sleep the first time. I also had a stinging pain in my right eye, accompanied by a peculiar numbness around the socket. It took me about a minute to realize that the source of the new disturbance to my corpus was, in fact, from my right paw, which I had, in my sleep-muddled mind, neglected to wash after annointing my shoulder earlier. As an encore to the toothpaste incident of earlier, I had mentholated my eye in my sleep.

I wasn't even really "up" yet, and my day already sucked.

Work was thankfully short, populated with a going-away luncheon for a coworker returning to India and several other meetings before coming home at 15h00 to pack, pick up Jessie and Winthrop, and then head down to Portland to hook up with Rowan and Cobaltie for the weekend. Aside from the absolutely atrocious traffic getting out of Seattle proper, the drive, while longish at just over three hours, wasn't bad at all and something I could easily see myself doing on a semi-regular basis. It's almost all highway, and well-marked at that, so the trip itself was less a hassle and more an empty space between places, a three-hour loading screen with some good music and conversation.

We arrived at Rowan's and Blue's house at just after 21h00, which given the late departure and the traffic still wasn't bad, and the weekend began to rapidly turn around. Jessie and I got to meet their friend Mitesh, who seems like someone I'd like to get to know better, and Elka was also present, which is good because I rarely get to see him. We chatted for a few minutes, caught up on current events, and then got down to the proverbial brass tacks.

As a warm-up for the evening, we watched Baraka, which lasts approximately three eternities when you dedicate all your attention to the events unfolding on the screen. I'm not sure that I could, in the space provided, adequately detail either the contents of the "film" or my emotional reactions to watching it. Suffice to say that it was the first time I'd ever seen it, and it blew me away. I suspect I still have memetic shrapnel from the experience that I'll be picking out for months, but that was, I think, the point of the exercise. In this case, it served as an excellent groundbreaker for the remainder of the evening.

Once we all regained control of both horizontal and vertical, I got the chance to do a bit of spiritwork. Before I get too deeply into that, though, I feel the need to take a moment and discuss what I mean when I say that. For anyone familiar with 12 Monkeys, consider the old man in the mental hospital that says, "just because it's a delusion doesn't mean it's not real," or words to that effect. I'm not saying here that I'm in contact with externalities who embody themselves to me via animal form. Really, when I talk of totems, I speak of those parts of my own head to which I have attached labels because of the symbol-sets that thirty-four years of being alive and experiencing the world through a particular set of filters has encoded in my subconscious. Why Bear? Why Rabbit? Why Coyote? Why not Wolf or Mouse or Raven? Why not Phoenix or Cat or Monkey? Why not even Magician or Fool or Tower? Because those weren't my symbols. The logos didn't take those shapes around me; it took the others. And so, when I tease loose a piece of my conscious mind, turn it inward, and stare at the rest of the mess that is my skull, these are the labels that I use to identify different parts of my own thought processes.

All that having been said, it's still damned freaky to realize that the closest thing you recognize to a goddess is taking the time to commune with you. It's not something that I can do at will, yet. It takes the right set and setting. It takes the right mood and drive. It's only happened three times in my life: when I first felt Bear's presence, when I felt Her leave, and when She brought Rabbit and Coyote to me in the depths of The Bad to keep me from taking The Easy Way Out. Always, under a time of great stress, and always at an emotional low point to help ricochet me back upwards.

Kimya evening, it happened again.

As with the first three, what happened wasn't an exchange of words; I don't even think my language centers were really engaged. If anything, spiritwork for me is about turning off the near-constant logorrhoea that runs through my head and occasionally externalizes as me talking to myself. It's about finding out what goes on when words cease being an option. I'm usually blind to anything beyond verbal communication, and so when I don't have that, everything else becomes larger-than-life.

The first time it happened, Bear's presence was more an announcement that She was there; there was no sense of information that needed to be imparted, merely a statement that I wasn't alone in my own head. The second time, it was... disappointment. Resignation. I had claimed to be something I wasn't for years, and the time for the charade was over. Rabbit found me later, but for a time I was without guidance, and it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my "adult" life. The third time, there was love, respect, and understanding. Rabbit reminded me that it was okay to be afraid. Coyote wanted to know if I'd gotten the joke.

Putting words to the gnosis this time, Bear reminded me, maternally and patiently, that I've taken real steps in the right direction, but that for a while now I've been confusing talking about progress and progressing. The mathematician cannot extinguish the fire by proving it can be done, and the plumber cannot repair the leaky faucet by showing off a certification. Understanding how to improve is important, but implementing that understanding is critical... and that's where I haven't been at my best.

So, what does this mean for the future? I don't want to go into great detail here, because I feel like saying too much before I've done anything will just perpetuate the talking-not-doing problem, but at the same time, I know the importance of feedbck in my own life, and I know the power of "say what you're going to do, do it, say what you did."

The ten-year-plan still marches apace. I remain vulnerable to losing my job, but I can take steps at work to minimize that risk. Pay off the car, pay off my father, get sixty-thousand dollars in savings so I have a year of liquid capital if I do lose my job, and then find land or a house sufficiently removed from Seattle that I can have space between me and my neighbors but not so removed that a day job's commute is unpleasant. Build a multi-family living space or renovate an existing one to LEED Platinum. Invite other like-minded individuals to join the commune and take up superintending.
I outright refuse to use the phrase, "I'm going vegetarian," because that's neither my plan nor my goal, but in the words of Michael Pollan, my intent is to "eat food, not too much, mostly plants." I don't care about the ethics of eating animals, and food with faces is still food, but my waistline and my planet will both benefit in the long run from dropping most of the meat from my diet. My budget will suffer, especially if I start shopping more often at Whole Paycheck.

In the vein of cutting back on the crap intake, my City of Heroes playtime is excessive and needs reduction. I've said it before in other places, but I think it's time I documented it for posterity. I want to be a writer, but getting feedback on my writing is nigh-impossible. I don't just mean "I like it; write more," or "you suck lol," but actual feedback about structure, style, narrative, characterization, et cetera. City of Heroes is an excellent multifaceted Skinner box, capable of providing immediate feedback on multiple channels, and logging in and roleplaying while I beat down bad guys generates instant feedback numerically and emotionally, just like hammering on that food-pellet bar. That's great, except the food pellets it provides taste like crap and can't be traded for better shinies outside the system. Meanwhile, writing gets me next to no response, but the rewards it produces when it does pay out are so much tastier and may ultimately yield positive results in other fields. I don't expect to quit the game, but it's got to go back to being a diversion, not a hobby.

I should start keeping an actual budget. Right now, I make sufficiently more than I need that I can afford to dump ten percent of my paycheck into savings as soon as it shows up, but I still have the occasional uncomfortable "hey, I'm going to have to put that on the credit card because the bank account is tapped until Kimya." Meanwhile, I've got a laundry list of things I'd like to be able to buy, as well as a small but growing list of medical purchases that would help with other goals, like the pedal exerciser and a fresh trip to the laser hair removal place for some touch-ups on my everywhere. Tracking what I spend as I spend it, rather than afterwards, should help with identifying places in which I could spend less.

Now, one would think that after a night loaded with such introspection and revelation, it would be hard to top it. Truth is, I don't think the rest of the Portland trip exceeded that point, but it definitely maintained the energy. Jugya morning, we finally got moving around 11h00 and headed out to a place called the Hotcake House, which served portions fit for any two ordinary people, but which was extremely tasty. We returned to the house for a few rounds of various games, while I nursed away a headache with some hot tea and ibuprofin. Then, that evening, we went to see Paul and Storm open for JoCo, which turned out to be approximately four hours of awesome. It was snowing when we left the concert, and we drove through big fluffy flakes to a parking lot, in which several food-stall trailers had been more-or-less permanently parked to form a little mini-food-court. There, we feasted upon poutine and crawfish etoufée and continued to talk about nothing in particular.

Pozya arrived slowly, but we watched Robert Newman's History of Oil on the XBox, which helped reinforce a lot of the ideas I'd had Kimya night. Then we headed collectively to downtown Portland and wandered around in the cold. We visited Everything Music, at which I replaced my missing Suzanne Vega 99.9F CD and discovered, quite by accident, that I very much enjoyed the musical stylings of a band by the name of Zombi; the shop was playing promo tracks from their as-yet-unreleased newest album when we arrived, and I liked the sound so much that I bought the one album of theirs in stock: Surface to Air. If you like orchestral electronic rock, you'll probably enjoy these guys. After this, we dropped around to Powell's, at which I didn't purchase anything but found a great many books that I could've gladly devoured. Then we visited Ground Kontrol, at which I fell in love with TRON all over again despite how bad I am at it, and I put the high score on the local Galaga88 machine. Finally, we ended up at Guardian Games, at which we all taught Jessie how to play Race for the Galaxy in such a way that she might even be interested in playing again some time, and then we all had fun re-enacting Reservoir Dogs. Finally, it was time to drop Rowan and Blue back at their place, and then we started home. The trip passed quickly, but we still didn't get back until close to 01h00 this morning.

I have the day off of work today, and I think my biggest priority right now after finishing this post is working out a menu with Jessie for the week, taking stock of the cans on the shelf, and then heading down to Whole Paycheck for fresh vegetables and other consumables. I think most of the cans are going to the local food bank, assuming we can find a place to drop them off that's not all the way downtown.

0003 Indera 08: In which I hang my head in shame....

2008-12-30T19:09:00.000-08:00

Dear Kanukistan:

Please accept my humblest apologies for destroying your culture. In the spirit of internationalism, I promise not to get offended if you choose to ignore Double-Meat Day.

Sincerely,

The Lapinian Consul-General.

So, I did it.

After thinking much of the day about very little at all—an unfortunate side effect of having had no available fires to fight at work that wouldn't have set even more alight—I decided that, gosh darnit, I really didn't have a good reason not to violate more human rights. So, on the way home, I stopped at the store, acquired the necessary torture devices, and came home and made Abominable Poutine.

This turned out to be surprisingly easy to do. Geneva should be notified.

I brought water to a boil, then put four red potatoes—about two pounds—into the water and cooked them for four minutes. Then they came out and went into a cold-water bath. After fully cool, I sliced them with an apple corer to produce more-or-less even wedges, which I left on paper towels to drain. This would form the base layer of the unholy disaster.

For gravy, I took approximately one tablespoon of bacon-turkey grease off of the top of the SOLO cup in the fridge and put it into another pan on the stove, melted it on medium heat, and added flour to form a roux, which I cooked until golden. Scraping off the remainder of the grease in the cup into a second container revealed a wealth of rich brown congealed turkey-bacon consommé, which plooped with a ploop into the pan with the roux and then melted into a very runny sauce. I added flour to thicken, whisking constantly, then added pepper and oregano to taste, then water to thin it back out when Jessie complained that I had made kitchen-paste.

Eight ounces of Swiss cheese got chopped up in place of curds, because QFC, while fancy, is not Whole Paycheck, and I didn't feel like going to Bellevue for an abomination. It felt a little too much like a violation of the Mann Act.

Frying potatoes turned out to be surprisingly complicated. First, I didn't dry out the water from the pan completely after rinsing it, so when the oil got hot, it immediately started to spatter, and of course I had no luck finding the spatterguard, so I just had to turn the heat down and wait, then wipe up most of the mess. Then I had the heat down too low for fear of scorching, which meant the potatoes didn't really fry so much as sog. When I did turn the heat up to medium-high, though, they almost instantly crisped up for their own good and turned the golden-brown I usually only see in 1970s-era cookbooks as a favored carpet shade. I spatulated them onto paper towels to dry.

The final combination was really just pouring all of the ingredients into a bowl in layers, plus some crumbled bacon from a bag from Costco, and a can of peas that I added specifically so that I could say I had consumed some kind of vegetable matter with dinner. The result... looked about as appealing as only a bowl of pepper gravy with Swiss cheese lumps and forlorn peas sticking out of it could. I didn't take a picture; I thought I would spare you all the pain.

The taste, though....

Jessie insists that the Swiss cheese is the wrong flavor—excuse me, flavour—and that I should've headed down to Bellevue to get cheddar curds. I, however, think that it adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the dish. That's French for "what the fuck." Whatever it is, it's gravy and potatoes and bacon and cheese and okay yeah there's a pea here and there but it's gravy and potatoes and bacon and cheese and what more you ask for?

Of course, having intentionally made poutine south of the Kanukistan border, I'm probably on the hook for some kind of violation of a treaty somewhere. I can only hope my above apology and the threat of an orbital lightning cannon are enough to restore international relations.

I'm sorry. So very, very sorry.

0003 Indera 07: Son of Abomination

2008-12-28T22:58:00.000-08:00

As I hope I've said before, I like snow. I do, really. I enjoy the appearance. I like walking in a light snowfall. I even enjoy tossing snowballs, and I get a mild thrill out of driving around and looking at snow-covered landscapes. Growing up in Texas, I never really had anything that people would consider "winter." The best we could manage was a heavy autumn every so often, with maybe black ice for entertainment, but real snow was a rarity.

Then I moved to Pennsylvania, and suddenly I understood what actual snow looked like. More to the point, I understood why people hated it. Six inches of accumulation on city streets will make them impassable to anything smaller than a duelie or a monster truck with chains, and I've had the good sense not to try to buy and then drive either of those. I did approximately USD1500 of damage to a Chevy Blazer getting blown sideways on a snowy road into a metal divider. Upon leaving the area, I was heartened to learn that, while "up the mountains" would get a lot of weather, Bothell rarely saw anything like that.

Of course, the year we arrived, we got precisely that kind of snowfall. I don't recall the exact details, but I remember clearly that one night my wife and my roommate set out for a quick trip for a computer component and ended up getting stuck for eight hours on the road, and that at some point during the winter we had to pack up some belongings and relocate to a hotel for three days, because the power in the apartment complex had died. Surely, though, such an event was a freakish occurance, not likely to happen again any time soon.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice....

As I type this, I'm looking at getting a good night's sleep, so that I can be in the office again for the first time in eight days. That's how much snow we've had this year. Three separate storms have hit us, or maybe one storm in three movements; it's hard to say. Either way, we've had between six and ten inches of accumulation since last week, and the weather reports I'm seeing say that we're supposed to get "a few flurries" next week. This after they told us that we'd see "an inch or two" last week. I am not hopeful.

In fact, the weather was so bad that of the time I've been out, the office actually closed day. Two I spent sick because the weather had necessitated us turning on the heater, which in turn dried out my throat and nose so badly that I practically crusted over internally. One was some holiday that everybody around here seems to take really seriously. The rest I remained indoors, working from home, because our apartment complex is situated on the side of a steep hill down which I couldn't have safely driven the car even if my life had required it.

Not to say I couldn't get down the hill in an emergency. I could, surely. I would just likely end up on 405 South without having taken an on-ramp, if you get my meaning.

So, what does one do when facing the prospect of being snowed in? Commit nutritional atrocities, apparently. I think this is becoming one of those morally hazardous Lapinian traditions, like hot pepper consumption for Indians or Jerry Lewis films are for the French.

Some of you may remember the abomination that I created for Bandaza this year. In the end, while the flavor was great, not all of the chicken breasts came out done, the meat near the bones was undercooked, and most of the bacon fell off of the turkey during the cooking, which ended up making a mess in the bottom of the oven, as the grease-trap trick of folded foil underneath the baking plate did astonishingly little to stop the flood of meat juices. It was an experiment, well worth undertaking, but obviously "beta code."

I believe I've perfected "version 1.0" of the bacon-infused turkey. Call it "Son of Abomination."

On one of the few trips out of the apartment to secure supplies between snowfalls, Tanya and I decided that a smaller turkey, twelve pounds or so, would make for a good meal for a few days. We got an "artisan" turkey, which is to say we got a heritage turkey that's not a Large White. I'm not sure what breed it was, exactly; I believe it was a White Holland, but I wouldn't swear to it. I do intend to check, though, and whatever I determine it was, I'd definitely buy it again. At any rate, it was a little over twelve pounds and still slightly frozen when I went to bake it.

So, I got the turkey into the pan, and I thought about what I was going to do to stuff it, because I still had some stuffing from making a batch earlier since this has apparently become favored nibl around the Embassy for the vegetable-eaters. Then I found a package of bacon in the bottom of the fridge, and I knew what I had to do.

Recalling the Bandaza experiment, I realized that the reason the bacon hadn't stayed in place was, obviously enough, nothing had been holding it where it needed to be. I still had no pins or other obvious tools, but I did have an embarrassment of creativity, and I devised a fix: I wove a bacon "blanket" for the turkey, ensuring that the side-to-side strips were always weighed down by at least two lengthwise ones. The strips covering the legs I "tied" in place, wrapping a second strip around the leg at the thickest part and looping it over to help hold the longer strip in place. The ones over the wings, sadly, I could only drape in place.

The whole assembly I then put into a proper roasting pan, which then went into the oven set to 350F, for two hours. I then dropped the temperature to 300F for another three-and-a-half, at which point I pulled it out and declared it done.

This time, almost none of the bacon fell off the turkey. I think a total of two strips fell into the bottom of the pan, to become part of the drippings, which I meticulously saved. This roast, unlike its predecessor, was cooked completely, succulent from skin to bone, and infused with sweet and meaty joy. The turkey legs pulled off of the main bird without a fuss, and the wings did as well.

Now I just have to decide what to do with a SOLO cup full of turkey-and-bacon drippings, besides make the awesomest gravy ever.

I think this should be proof unto the gods that there is, in fact, a thing as too much snow. Though, considering that whole poutine thing up in Kanukistan, I'm not so sure.

Hang on. Fries... with bacon... and Swiss cheese... and turkey-and-bacon gravy....

I know what I must do.

Always one more try.... I'm not afraid to die.

0003 Ertera 15: General Trivia

2008-12-08T23:54:00.000-08:00

So, as always, it's later than I expect updating this thing. I always start off with the best of intentions, saying "I'm going to update regularly from now on! Every Kimya after work! Every Pozya morning! Something, just... say something!" Of course, me being me, I get distracted, and then I get sullen and silent over the fact that I haven't updated, and that leads me to... delay updating.

Vicious Cycle: see Cycle, Vicious.

So, first, the all-important post-Bandaza update. The turkey turned out wonderful; The bacon stayed in place for the first hour or so, and then crisped up and fell off, destroying my careful entombment of the bird, but having imparted a good amount of grease and pepper to the turkey itself, which kept the bird moist during the rest of the cook cycle. Much of the chicken inside came out tender as well, though the middle of the bird and the innermost breast failed to cook to my satisfaction and went instantly into the trash. I don't know how many arteries clogged as a result of my dish, but I'm sure I've just added to the overall cost of American health care.

Of course, during clean-up I did manage to dump the turkey carcass, including the serving platter and all of the drippings, onto the carpet. Some quick work from a number of friends managed to prevent any unlivable damage, but there's a weird dry-and-flaky spot on the carpet that will need power-vacuuming at some point, or perhaps a good carpet cleaning. Most like, it means the end of my security deposit, but I never expect to get that back anyway.

All in all, ten people came for the get-together, not a record but a fair showing. When I told my parents about it later, they were shocked to discover that I could actually prepare a meal for ten people. I told them I'd served for fifteen once, and they were duly impressed. Maybe they were horrified. Either way, I got impassioned responses from them on the subject of my holiday meals. No real conversation occurred on exactly what I celebrate, but that's a minor detail.

Much of the intervening time has been, sadly, a case of "Work Eat Me!" To give you the best description yet that I've found to tell people what working at Big Pink is like, imagine that you're a firefighter working for an insurance company doing damage control, and you get a call from a customer who says, "my car is on fire but I'm late for my child's wedding or maybe it's my wife's first delivery; I forget. Either way, I need you to come drive alongside me and put out the flames so I can get to where I'm going without dying in a fireball or stopping. Remember, if I burn up, it's your fault!" Now imagine that every call you ever get is like this. Eventually, you know the drill by heart, and you get really good at fighting mobile fires, but you know that for every fire you successfully smother, two or three cars have exploded and one driver has simply stopped calling, and so you know it's all very urgent every time, but it's really hard to care about any individual case too much.

Jessie's been out of town over the last week, which happened to coincide with my on-call rotation, which has meant that my sleep levels have been absurdly low. I don't sleep well when she's not around, so I end up delaying trying to sleep until I'm too tired to do anything beyond crawl into bed and collapse, but three times last week I would lie down and then get a work call ten minutes later, meaning several days at work with virtually no sleep. This has made for some interesting conversations with my manager, to be sure.

Further Confusion 2009 approaches swiftly; I'm going to need to arrange the days off of work. Plane tickets are apparently absurdly cheap at the moment, so rather than drive twelve hours each way, we may fly it. I'll discuss the options with Jessie, but I'll confess that I'm having second thoughts. It's not that I won't have a good time. It's not even that I'm afraid I won't have a good time. It's that every time I turn around, it seems like there's some large expense that "we can afford just this once" that keeps me from getting ahead on my goals. Ghost Patrol was absolutely awesome despite my feet giving out and my general exhaustion, but the final bill came out to more than I expected. Jessie's enjoying her trip to her parents', but it was an emergency expense not in the budget that I could only just barely afford. Now FC's approaching, and while I don't expect it to be a bank-breaker, it's yet another bill that I'm somewhat loath to incur, even knowing I'll enjoy the experience.

Of course, I make this complaint knowing that there are people I count among my friends who can't afford to put two beans on the table in the same night. I don't know how to feel about that. I'm reasonably secure in my job, I have a good home, I have roommates with whom to share good times and living expenses, and I'm bitching that I'm not paying off my car enough ahead of schedule. Meanwhile, people I care about are literally starving. Part of me feels really shit-tacular when I think of it that way, but on the other hand, it's not like I haven't been generous. I just wonder if I'm being generous enough. Call it Schindler's Syndrome.

In more cheerful news, I'm slowly adding the back entries from my old website to the Ranch. I did a large lump and then stalled for a while, but I haven't forgotten. Nor, for that matter, have I forgotten the Nail, but it too has languished. Most of Fathera and the end of Ertera goes into preparation for the holidays, and frankly while Jessie's out of town my energy levels are usually pretty low anyway. Plus, work's been a beast through various on-call shifts and teammate vacations, so most nights I've come home, fought crime for a few hours, and then called it a day, when I could sleep at all. Bombarding hordes from towers has sucked up large chunks of my time as well. Plus, starting in the near future, I'm going to be helping to organize a puzzling event to be held in the spring, and somehow on top of all of this I have to help prep for All Fur Fun at the same time.

What I really need is a twenty-eight hour day and a nine-day week.

Is it any wonder I'm not crazy? Is it any wonder I'm sane at all?

0003 Ertera 03: Bandaza Madness!

2008-11-26T18:19:00.000-08:00

It's Bandaza time again here at the Lapinian Embassy; most folks would call it Thanksgiving, but we know it as the Days of Plenty, a three-day celebration of charity.

The holiday actually started in its current form over a dozen years or so ago, now, actually. It wasn't uncommon among my friends in Texas to be from some form of broken home: divorced parents, estrangement, a lack of speaking terms, or just plain too far away to drive and too broke to fly. One of my friends, herself from Circumstances, decided at one point that, for all of her friends who had no place to go for a "traditional family dinner," they now could come over to her place. Now, at the time, I actually had a pretty good home life, but I ended up with a standing invitation, and I enjoyed cooking enough that it was always worth it to me to make a point of going over at some point to add to the potluck.

When I moved out onto my own, I took with me the idea of opening up my home during Thanksgiving for people who needed or wanted some place to be, and subsequently it evolved into a standing part of Lapinian tradition. In its time, it's hosted a half-dozen up to fifteen people, nowhere near the thirty that I would see in Texas but still more than I would normally host at once. It's been successful enough as a plan that I hear there's now a version of it starting up in Portland, and the Boston crowd has hosted one of its own for a while now.

In deference to some of the people who'll be attending who're vegetarian, I've decided to for the first time try my hand at poaching a goodly portion of rock cod in an orange spice tea, which I've been told should work rather well. I've got my directions, and I'm fairly sure I won't screw it up too badly. There will also be a small mound of succotash, a perennial favorite of mine that I'll even prepare when it's not the holiday season. My mother's cornbread stuffing will be in evidence, in two varieties: one with sautéed vegetables and one made with bacon grease in the cornbread. Finally, there will be mashed potatoes.

I'm sure those of you keeping tally will have noticed one of the traditional mainstays of the American Thanksgiving tableau that is missing. That would be correct. I'm not providing a turkey this year; I'm making an Abomination.

At least, this is what Jessie called it.

In years past, the turkey has always been the one part of the meal over which I've had the least success. Either I've overcooked it and it's come out dry, or I've undercooked it and it's been inedible. Last year, I tried brining the turkey, which worked out okay, but this year, thanks to something Zander showed me, I'm going with something... new.

A bacon-wrapped-chicken-stuffed-bacon-wrapped turkey. That is, a turkey which has been stuffed with bacon-wrapped chicken, which is then wrapped in bacon.

Photo evidence has been collected. The following pictures may disturb you.

Tomorrow, we'll decant this mythic beast and bake it. Tonight, though, I rest well knowing that I'll have something truly horrifying with which to confront my guests this year. Hopefully everyone who isn't a vegetarian will at least consider the option after this. The rest, may Dobbs have mercy on their digestive tracts.

0003 Fathera 27: Under Construction!

2008-11-22T16:50:00.000-08:00

So, the time has finally come for me to put the breaks on the old diary and move into the twentieth century. I hear the kids today have automated linotypes, even. What will our calculation engineers think of next?

The real joy of the operation, as it were, is migrating the whole mess of old posts to the new site. I suppose in strictest sense that wouldn't be necessary, but the fact is that I'd like to have all of the history in the same place. This way, at least, people can search through the archives if they're so inclined. I'm even doing my best to tag past entries, though for the most part so far that's really been trivial; most of the old posts are about my transition, and so far the few which aren't have been about people who were highly important to me in the days when I was still figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I suppose that's only fitting, really. The whole purpose of The Bridge was to serve as an interim home for my thoughts while I underwent a massive realignment. It wasn't supposed to be permanent, other than as a record of how I had changed over time. My plan had always been, at least in theory, that one day I'd figure out who I wanted to be and "cross the bridge." By the time the site needed a stylistic update, I'd have finished with all of the existential questions and then could get on with the Serious Business of living my new life.

Of course, as it always seems to go, asking the existential questions seems to have become my life, or at least a large part of it.

I take comfort in the thought that I'm not alone in this. The Founding Fathers, for instance, expected that the Constitution would be a document that got rewritten every so often, and they provided the amendment process as a tool for fixing bugs until the next major release. Almost as soon as it was released, of course, it became the new standard and since then we've been slapping patch after patch on a document badly past its day. I don't mean for this to turn into a political diatribe; I'll have plenty of time for those later. I'm just commenting on the fact that I'm not the only one to fall victim to this particular process.

I believe the relevant quotation from the fortune file is "once is a bug, twice is a feature, three times is a design philosophy."

So, is the Ranch on Mars the "new identity?" No more so than the Bridge was the "old identity." If anything, the Ranch is an admission that I'm getting old. Another "big idea" that I had during the creation of my previous website was that I would write all these nifty gadgets and gewgaws to do things like accept comments and provide forum-like options to people. That led to design ideas involving logins and building a database to handle it, and coding up a front-end that would let people log into my site and do all kinds of cool stuff. By the end, it looked like the internet equivalent of a six-year-old's Awesomest Tree Fortress Evar, complete with ice-cream ski slope and sister-launching catapult.

About the time I started figuring out cookies and all that fancy dribble, LiveJournal started making the rounds. I could've bought in then, I suppose, but I was still riding high on my brain-juice telling me that I was better than all those faddish types. I didn't buy a cell phone, either. And I still wrote everything in C. Everything.

Eventually, I do learn. It just takes me a while.

So, here I am, putting up the finishing touches on the new home. Now I don't have to do any of the messy backend management, and I can hook up all the gewgaws and gadgets to the site itself that I don't have to try to integrate myself onto every single page to get visibility. It just works, which is more than I can say of what I had for nine years. Sure, it served its primary purpose, but in the same way that a cardboard box keeps the rain off your head in a storm. Yes, you're dry, but it'd be a lot nicer to have working plumbing and lights at the same time.

0003 Pyevera 05: Lapinian

2008-10-03T23:52:00.000-07:00

First off, a Roast Beef-esque comment: "I'm the one who sucks." More accurately, "I'm the one who, in trying to figure out why she couldn't get her phone to connect to her home wireless network when she should've been sleeping, successfully screwed up her wireless internet settings to the point that the only fix was a reset to factory defaults, which she did again when she should've been sleeping, and in such a fit of frustrated pique that she didn't back up her contacts database first."

Short form of the above, if you gave me your contact information any time in the last year, I don't have it now. If you'd like me to have it, please send it to me. Next time, I promise I'll think really hard about waiting until morning before losing my cool at a piece of unfeeling technology next time. =x.x=

Now what am I gonna do about my problems?

With that lovely preliminary out of the way, two recent conversations have been weighing on me of late. These thoughts have been swirling around now for some time, and I've made some effort into encapsulating them and making them meaningful, but I'm not really sure that I've done a good job of it up until now. I'm not even really sure that I'm going to do any better this time, but I think I've dwelt on these concepts long enough internally, and so it's time to push them out of the nest to see if they fly.

The human brain relies on labels. We name and categorize, because verbal learning is something that we're good at doing, and because it's convenient for the transmission of ideas. Semiotically, we depend on signifiers to convey intent and meaning about the signified. I recognize that some branches of Eastern philosophy directly oppose this idea, but ironically I have nothing to say about any belief system that holds that to name something is to destroy it.

Unfortunately, as I'm sure everyone has experienced at some point, the map between signifier and signified is an intensely personal one. I'm convinced that everyone has, at some point or another, attempted to talk to someone else and, despite every attempt to come to common ground, failed to make sense of what the other has said. In this, I see communication as an existential crisis. In order for me to say something to you, whoever you are, I must first encode my thoughts, my signified, into a signifier, which you must then decode. Worse, in order to explain my encoding algorithm, I must use it. I can't share with you how I translate signified into signifier without... translating signifieds into signifiers and then trusting you to translate them back in the same way. No two people can communicate with each other beyond the extent to which their encoding and decoding routines overlap, and the degree of that overlap is the degree to which people can actually share ideas with each other.

This isn't to say that we can't learn to communicate with each other, but the process by which we learn to communicate is an essentially non-verbal method. We come to understand, through exposure and effort, the signifieds to which others refer when they use their signifiers, and we learn how to adjust our own signifiers to refer to the same signifieds when trying to communicate with those people. So, not only is the map personal, but it's intersubjective as well. When I say something to one person, I may mean something different from when I say the same thing to another person, simply because I'm trying to adjust for the maps that those people use to decode signifier back to signifed.

If all of this seems complex and convoluted, keep in mind that most of this happens at the sub- or semi-conscious level. We don't, for the most part, think about our language in this way. We simply pick up on these things over time, growing our maps as we interact with people. We identify those people with whom we don't share enough of a communication grid to try to make headway and we remove them from our social circles. We learn the trigger words and phrases that cause others to go into frothy rants and then talk around them. Very rarely is this a deliberate, conscious effort.

I should note that we do this with non-verbal communication, as well. Arms crossed, leaning forward versus back, hands in the pockets, the slouch, the scissorclip walk. We learn to communicate through our body language, our imagery, our clothing and hair. We project information through a broad set of signifiers, all aiming to convey a certain set of signifieds that we hope others can decode.

I'll also note that the map between signifier and signified is a many-to-many relationship. I can have multiple ways of saying the same thing, such as a smile, a hug, a handshake, and the word, "hello" said with joy in my voice. I can bundle a great many signifieds into a single signifier, such as when I attempt to convey both the sense of warmth and the fear of being hurt in the statement, "religion is like fire."

Now, in the past, this would be the point at which I jump in and say that my map is disjoint. However, it would be a very pretty lie. My map's weird, but it's got a pretty broad overlap with other folks. When I speak, I like to think that most people get a pretty good idea of what I'm saying. I couldn't make it as a writer if I couldn't communicate through my words, and I like to think that I manage fairly decently. So, it's not really a communication gap.

I think what I'm finding, instead, is that there's a couple of large but specific discontinuities between my communication map and others', and I think that these gaps are what's causing some of the stranger emotional disconnects that I've had with people. Before I get too deeply into these, though, I want to temporarily branch off of this topic and launch into more pop-cybernetics and show off my Throbbing Verbal Cortex for a bit.

I think that, when a person identifies with a label, there's a desire for that association to be an emotionally positive one. I won't try to claim that this is any sort of universal truth, because I've definitely met people who hold onto self-harmful identities. However, I think that those are offset by other identities that are worth the pain that those negative associations inflict. In this, a label or a signifier is really no different from any other association. We want to enjoy the things we have. We want to like ourselves. We want to respect ourselves. We want our identities to be things that we're proud to be, and we find ways to make those associations positive.

Identification with a label doesn't have to be direct, but it does have to be impactful. If I think of X as a negative assocation, and I like person Y, finding out that Y identifies with X is likely to change my opinions about one or the other, depending on which is more important to me. It's this kind of psychological impact that leads people to encourage the genderqueer and the abnormal to come out to their conservative relatives. As long as a given
label belongs only to Others, people and things outside our personal contexts, there's no impact to hold a negative view of all people who claim that particular label. "Lolfurries."

I could diverge here and launch into an analysis of why people who want to identify with a label will devote such time and energy to destroying others who openly hold it, the politics of shame, and the power of guilt. However, that would be a digression from my point, which is to say lead back to the communications gap I mentioned before. I don't have any personal association to a lot of the labels which are common to modern society. I was born in the United States, but I don't consider myself "American," and looking back at my history, I never have. I was baptized and spent time as an altar boy, but I don't consider myself "Christian," and again I don't think I ever did. I rejected the idea of nation-as-identity from a very young age, and church-as-identity even earlier. I spent twelve years identifying as an "Objectivist," though, and even now I try to rehabilitate the label despite my objections to the term. The collection of labels that I've self-applied doesn't match the set that most people I know had, and as a result I have very different emotional responses to these signifiers, so much so that it's caused communication breakdowns with some of my closest friends.

Breaking out my metaphysical soldering iron, here's where I try to draw together these two concepts and create something new out of them. I've heard a lot of talk of late about reclaiming language, of taking terms away from the mainstream and owning them. I'm no stranger to this idea, and in many ways I'm in support of it. The list of terms that I want to reclaim, however, seems to not line up with the ones that others want to salvage. I have no interest in making "American" mean something positive to me. I've got no reason to want "Christian" to be anything but a stone around someone else's neck. I can agree that "religious" needs to be taken away from the fundamentalists and the orthodox, but I'd rather not see it be used in any sort of unmistakably positive context.

Jessie said to me last night that, for the longest time, I defined myself by what I wasn't. She's right; I did. I was an activist from an early age, setting myself against the Other and defining myself as a constrast against them. I'm starting, however, to understand that I can't exist forever as a shadow. I don't want to be a contrast against someone else's vision. I'm tired of living in opposition to the mainstream, and yet as long as I try to absorb and adopt the labels of the mainstream to mean what I wish, I'll forever be someone else's degenerate interpretation.

The Lapinian Embassy started out as humor, an extension of the joke of international, interplanetary, interstellar, interdimensional diplomatic relations with others who Weren't From Around Here. What it's become, however, is something far more. It's become a label that, at least in my own map, I can own. It's the identity for which I and those I choose to involve can set the standard. It has as its forebears a myriad of others' fringe interpretations, but I'm okay with that. Martin Luther was still Catholic when he nailed his thoughts on indulgences to the door of the church in Wittenberg.

Jessie once said that everyone becomes a liberal at the point at which zie realizes that zie's different from others. It's in the nature of liberalism to divide, to separate, to evolve and grow and change over time. In this, I embrace these divisions, these separations, in order to evolve, not as a reflection of someone else's world, but as an embodiment of my own. I step out of the shadow of others, and into my own light.

I am Lapinian... whatever that means. =n.n=

All Clenches must schism.

0003 Radera 01

2008-08-04T23:46:00.000-07:00

So, another month, another lack of update.

Really, it's not that I don't care about this thing any more. It's more the case that I get caught up in doing things and I don't really think about telling folks about it. I just don't "blog" the way most people do. Rather than talk about what's going on right now with my life, I tend to save up and dump it all out into large blocks, and then I forget stuff between when I start saving and when I figure it's time to post. So, chalk it up to use differences, more than interest fatigue.

So, this serves as a prelude to answering the question, "what has th' buni been doing for the last six weeks?"

Despite the removal of one user from my IRC server and the subsequent disappearance of a few others, the universe has not imploded, nor did I really expect anything like that to happen. I did expect a much larger hew and cry about the whole affair, but on the whole people seem to be pleased with the outcome. The community doesn't appear to have splintered, and in fact seems cohesive enough to assemble an anthology of short stories posted to the Shifti, though I'm not involved in the project directly. Still, things seem to be on an even keel there, so I'm not inclined to do too much rocking.

Anthrocon came and went during the downtime. I'm usually uncomfortably enthusiastic for AC, but this year was a little weird. Everything felt very last-minute, very rushed. Part of this was my own inertia; I didn't get the hotel situation resolved until the last minute, and we ended up having to change rooms twice during our stay in Pittsburgh. Part of it was a general lack of planning on my part, and I confess part of it was the ever-present sensation that I've failed in my own goal to have something for the dealers' room. However, as always, I went and had a blast and look forward to going again next year.

Of course, one thing that I've lamented for years is my lack of anything worth selling in the dealers' room. So, my plan is for AC next year, if not for some con prior, to have Beautiful World ready for publication by then. I'm actually further along on this project than it seems. I've broken the halfway mark for a science fiction novel—forty-thousand words—and I'm not yet halfway through the development. I've charted it out, and as long as I'm finishing a chapter every three weeks, I'll have enough time left to get the novel into publishable shape in time to get some advance copies for Anthrocon next year.

Unfortunately, this isn't coming without a price. I'm sure somebody has noticed by now that links to three of the chapters I'd posted previously have gone missing from my website. This isn't an act of censorship so much as it's an attempt to preserve the "publishability"—if that's a word—of the rest of the book. I'm not sure if this is an actual concern, but I'm in better-safe-than-sorry mode. This also means that I won't be posting any more parts of the book to my website, and when FA comes back up, I'll be removing some of the previous sections. I'm not entirely happy with it, but it seems like the best of a set of questionable alternatives.

Now, what this also means is that I'm looking for a shortlist of folks who'd be interested in serving as alpha-readers of the new parts of the story as they become available. One of the things I'll confess quickly and eagerly is that feedback is a large part of what helps drive the creative beast, and I'm making strides with generating that internally, but I'm also aware that other people reading my stuff helps me feel like making more. I don't think I want the universe involved in this process, but I'd love to have a pawful of folks interested in helping me make the book better. I'm not sure what I can offer right now for services rendered other than, like, autographed copies, but I'm sure I can come up with something.

In other news, I've successfully paid off the bankruptcy, which means that the thousand-per-month drain on my budget is now gone, to soon be replaced by a seven-hundred-per-month car payment, if my estimations are right, as well as gas and car insurance which should round me out to the money I'm presently "saving". So, no real movement ahead, but I'll have my own transport again, which will go a long way towards restoring my confidence in my ability to get ahead. Right now, the most likely vehicle on my list is a hybrid Ford Escape, not because I want an SUV but because nobody makes a hybrid station wagon that I wouldn't have to import and I can't afford to hold out until next year for some of the theoretical sixty-miles-to-the-gallon BMW or similiar. Plus, I can fit inside the Escape, or at least I'm led to believe that I can.

Speaking of fitting, the Weight Chart is back online. I found a scale with a 400-pound capacity, and I'm rather embarrassed to admit that at the beginning of the measurements, I needed it. The current trend shocks me, but today's lunch will likely change the direction of the red line for a day or two, mostly because I was in a hurry and ate faster than I could register it. That and portion control seem to be my biggest bugbears, but even there I'm getting better, little by little.

I actually weight to a doctor about my weight, and I learned a few interesting things I'd rather not have known. Rather, I'm glad i know them, but I'm not happy about them being facts, or even historical trends. Basically, whatever my weight was when I was eighteen, give or take two years, is my body's "set point", and most of the natural tendencies will be to maintain that number. Since I weighed 350 pounds at eighteen, I'm likely going to be fighting uphill forever. I've looked into bariatric surgery, but what I'm seeing in the latest reports is that it's a six-year "fix" that ends up not actually solving anything and compounds outstanding problems with new dietary fuckery. Most of the drugs combatting weight loss lead to side effects worse than the weight itself causes. So, apparently the sane goal for someone of my size and history is 315, which is ten percent of base body mass. I'm headed in the right direction, but it's likely going to be a long, painful road.

I'm not saying I'm giving up on the goal. I'm merely setting the expectations for myself and everyone else. Failure is likely, for reasons that have nothing to do with how hard I try or how much I want it.

That one thing aside, though... things seem to be shockingly good. There've been a few dips and wobbles here and there, but they're all things that can be resolved through talking and effort. I'm still not exactly the most social person alive, but I'm feeling better about casual interaction than I have in a while. I still have a pretty big back log of rants on various subjects, but the urge to drop trou and shit into a text file has gone down significantly in the last few months, even if the subject matter is itself fascinating. I really don't have any reason to bitch.

Perhaps that more than anything is driving the silence. I'm just... happy with my life, for the most part, and the elements with which I'm dissatisfied are all things on which I'm actively working. Happy people don't make waves. I'd love to be up for challenging the system and burning the world, but really, I've got it good right now, and I don't want to blow it.

Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

0003 Byetera 01: Removal

2008-06-09T23:44:00.000-07:00

Tonight, I removed WolvenOne, formerly known as Wolf-0013, from the TFnet IRC server. In a previous post, I spoke of a user causing problems, and a collection of users by extension that I considered to be memetically dangerous to the type of community I want to create. As a result of the previous altercation, Jessie asked him directly what sort of punishment he would impose if he were in our shoes. He suggested a moratorium on the subject matter from the user in question and that he would ban on the next offense. We agreed that that would be fair.

Tonight, he jumped with all four feet into a political discussion, and Jessie caught him doing it.

I didn't do this lightly. I didn't do this joyfully. I'm sorry that the situation has come to this, but I'm not sorry I did it. For many years, I have been a poor example of a community-minder. I don't own the dialogue, nor do I own the concepts or the people. I do, however, own the space on which the dialogue has occurred, and as such I have a responsiblity to ensure that my users have a positive experience. WolvenOne, in my opinion, was a net negative on the vast majority of people present, and removing him from the conversation is a step I took to preserve the health of the community as a whole.

No doubt some of you who read this and who use the service will disagree. This is your right, and I will not tell you that you're wrong.

In addition, Rabbit—Phil Geusz—has announced that he will not be returning. When the situation arose, he said that his honor was at stake if he didn't take a principled stand against our actions. We in turn said that our authority as administrators were at stake if we issued warnings and then did not act on them when our users made deals with us and then broke them. He said that he understood, and we accepted his reasons for departing.

To be utterly sure, I am not naming names in this post to call anyone out. I am not here to insult, deride, or harangue. I am not here to put anyone On Notice, and I am not here to incite riot. I am providing as close to a neutral accounting of the events in question as possible to eliminate the chance of rumor and hearsay. For all that we disagree on politics, I still consider Phil a friend, and I wish him nothing but the best. I will hate to see him go, and I hope that one day he has a change of heart and returns.

No doubt others of you will wish to do the same. You will also be missed.

Welcome to Rumour Control. These are the facts.

0003 Dalera 22: Censor

2008-06-02T23:37:00.000-07:00

As some of you may know, I run an IRC server dedicated—in theory—to writers and readers of "transformation fiction," a fancy way of dressing up various ideas such as age-regression, furry and animal transformation, sex and gender alteration, and the like all under a common banner. The history of how I ended up the administrator of this service is long and varied, and by and large it's unimportant. What matters at this point is that the service sits on my server.

I bring this up not because I want to talk about the details of the service. I'm not interested—right now—in talking about the people who inhabit the place. I'm not bringing this up to talk up the quality of the writers and other artists who visit. I'm not even interested in tooting my own horn as an administrator, because Connie knows what a shitty job I've done of that. No, I mention the IRC server because I have a question to my friends regarding political philosophy.

This may not seem like an obvious connection, so let me try to draw in some of the missing lines. I like to think of myself as a pretty leftist sort. If you click on over to Political Compass, I'm somewhere around a (-7,-7) based on their quick test, and I've got no real reason to think this is that far off from true. This puts me somewhere to the "left" of Dennis Kucinich, who is routinely disregarded as a laughable nutjob for his "dangerously liberal" political views. In fact, it puts me around Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama, quite far away from the political center and nigh-uncrossable oceans removed from what is considered "the center" in American politics.

What this means, as related to the above, is that I regard the IRC server that I run as a service. I don't expect recompense for my work. I do it because I believe that it needs to be done. I'm not now asking to be showered with praise, nor am I asking for money. I'm pointing out that I've kept this thing running for five years over three moves and multiple hardware upgrades. I kept the service going even in the depths of The Bad when I really couldn't afford to pay for internet connectivity, because I felt it was important to maintain the server for the folks who used it. This is my fandom, too, and this is how I support it.

Now, all this might by itself be happy backpatting, if not for the real meat of this post. I have a number of users who are, for lack of a better descriptor, bootstrap-libertarians. They, like everyone, connect to the server because they are members of the transformation fandom. They enjoy a good story as much as the next person, and they all do their parts to support the "scene," as it were. However, they—like any other normal human being—have interests that extend beyond the one single topic that unites us, and this means that on a fairly regular basis, I have a small but devoted crowd of people spouting ideology that is utter anathema to my own.

Now, I want to reiterate here, just in case it's been missed. I don't hate these people. I don't reject the basic humanity of these people. I don't think these people are bad people. I think they're dangerously misguided. I think that their ideas are broken because they're based on logical fallacies and untrue assumptions about the basic human condition. However, I've attempted more than once to "agree to disagree" and yet the topics seem to come back time and again, and I'm frankly getting sick of having to deal with the subject matter.

To make matters more... challenging... I find myself thinking of them all, collectively, as hypocrites. The users who understand the idea of a service willingly provided because of the betterment of the commons as a result, I accept and gladly. I wouldn't expect money from them, because they all know why I do what I do, and they in turn don't get on my case for not being the best admin money can buy, because I'm not doing this for profit. The BSLs, on the other hand, all spout at length about the elimination of government handouts, the evils of taxation, and the general stupidity of "liberals," and yet not one of these people has ever once offered to pay for zir bandwidth, nor has a one of them recognized that they're receiving a "handout" and left in protest, or set up a competing paid service.

Is it really so difficult to understand, that if I agreed with their ideals I would have shut down the server long ago as unprofitable?

One of the cornerstones of my philosophy, and one I don't think I've ever really gotten to state here, is that of the "transitivity of tolerance." That is, I am tolerant of any philosophy which is itself tolerant of other philosophies. I am likewise intolerant and rejecting of any philosophy which claims to be the One True Way. It is in this fashion that I lay claim to the mantle of open-mindedness while actively telling those who insist that they have a monopoly on truth that they're unreservedly wrong.

So, now we come full circle, and I get to the question I originally wanted to ask. Would I be out of line in telling the libertarians who inhabit my server that they're welcome to take their business elsewhere? Am I committing some error of judgment or knowledge towards that political system that would bring it back into the realm of "welcoming of other views?"

On the one hand, I see this both as memetic health and cultural health. I believe in a healthy state of political debate, but there has to be some agreement on basics before that debate can happen, and with these people I feel that there's no way to have that. Just as I couldn't have a discussion on the minutae of biology with a creationist, I simply have no means to have a policy debate on the extent of government assistance with someone who says that the government has no business offering it.

On the other, this is censorship, after a fashion. It may be healthy censorship, as any successful forum moderator has had to apply at some point but I don't want to paint a pretty face on it and pretend it's something that it's not. This is the elimination of a certain set of ideas from the public discourse. I'm not stopping them from forming their own forum. I'm not telling them they have no right to be heard. I am, however, saying that they no longer have a right to use my server to further their ideals. As much as I can tell myself over and over again that this is utterly consistent not only with my ideals but my rivals' as well, I feel like I need a second pair of eyes on this before I pull the trigger.

0003 Dalera 09: Patience

2008-05-20T23:30:00.000-07:00

Today started with a dream:

It's late, and Jessie and I and two other people are driving in the darkness. We're lost, and we're tired, and we need to find a place to stop for the night. We come across a manorhouse, and the servant that answers the door looks at us suspiciously and tells us that, "the families are under oath not to turn away the needy, but tonight was a bad night for us to arrive." He assigns us each a room by giving us each a card and telling us to sleep in our specified quarters, nowhere else, and then in the morning we should be gone with first light if we can.

The two people with us that I didn't recognize received the same room, a "master bedroom for guests" with a king-sized bed meant for two people. In one corner of the room is a rope, and the servant says that it holds the chandelier in another room above someone's bed. They crawl into bed and are unconscious almost instantly, tossing and turning. He mentions off-handedly what a tragedy it would be if one of the guests pulled the rope loose in their sleep. As we're leaving, we hear a crash, and then a few drops of blood spatter the sheet covering our "associates."

Jessie receives a room with a single day bed and we reluctantly part, knowing we'd be incapable of sharing that space to sleep. My room is upstairs somewhere. I'm told that it's in the Topiary, near the Cambrai Hall, or at least that's what I think I hear. I tell the servant I think I can find it, and he looks at me skeptically but leaves me to wander the halls of this ancient house, filled with living plants and shadows. Twice I go up a staircase and think I've come back to the same landing as before.

All of the rooms and halls are labelled in small brass plaques, but what I thought was archaic English may not be. The word I heard as "Cambrai" is spelled with something that's either an abnormally stylized "final i" or else it's some other letter entirely, a short vertical stroke with a long intro serif, more like a one or a stylized seven than a letter. Now I'm starting to doubt what I heard, and where I am. I still haven't slept; I can't find my room. I find the Topiary, but not the bedroom I've been told is within, and I'm loath to fall asleep anywhere else, now more than ever.

In time, sunlight starts to filter into the house, and I start to hear voices as people rise. Twice I see people in Edwardian garb talking in the halls, and only luck keeps me from being seen. I'm not supposed to be here. Someone spots me and approaches, an older woman with red hair. She smiles when she sees me and addresses me as quot;Adama," saying it's good to see me again after so long. I stammer my way through a conversation, apologizing for being distracted and claiming I haven't slept a wink. She says she understands, expressing excitement at a "full gathering" after so long. She says she'll see me at breakfast in the main hall.

I say, "Thanks, auntie," on a hunch, and she makes a face, obviously annoyed. She tells me that she's tired of that joke and reminds me that I'm her cousin, not her niece. I blush and apologize, saying it was meant in jest and that if it stung, I was sorry. She's mollified at this and leaves me to my search. I find the bedroom, but now I'm too curious to sleep, and didn't we have to be gone at first light? I hurry downstairs, looking for Jessie's room or the others, but the house has changed. Her room is gone, and in its place is a long, open space lined with statues.

I start to panic, but before I can do anything an older man grabs my shoulder, spins me around, and begins to regale me with how wonderful it is to see the family's "shining star." He goes on at length about how he knew from the first moment he saw me that I would go on to do great things, that he knew it from my sculpt. I blink, and he motions behind me to an empty space in the corridor where he is obviously seeing something I can't. He describes it in detail, and others present nod admiringly. He then tells me that outside, everyone is "muddy" and "cloudy", but that he can spot a member of the clan in an instant because they're "clear" with a "shining heart" inside. My panic is at odds with my confusion. If he can spot outsiders, why haven't I been sent away yet?

Everyone leaves, and I ask someone in parting if there's breakfast. He looks at me patronizingly and says it's in the Great Hall, but that I should watch myself, as Brogan—I think—has it in for me. I follow the crowd, and on the way I hear someone say, disparagingly, "once a Mercedes, always a Mercedes." No-one's looking at me as this is being said; I think it's in reference to Brogan. I still have no idea what's happening, but now I'm more hungry than tired.

Sunlight floods the Great Hall and six longtables are set with fine china and genuine silver. Servants bring in food and start serving, and we all take our seats. Someone pelts me with a roll, and I turn to see a man—a grown boy, really, not much older than I— with a sneering smirk and sideburns, in a white button-down shirt, brown suspenders that match his pants and shoes, and gold cufflinks. I heft the roll as if to throw it back, but before I can a crash fills the hallway. One of the servants, in adjusting a heavy mirror hanging on the wall, has brought it down on top of himself. Part of the glass has shattered and spilled on the ground, the rest crushing him under its weight.

In a flash, Brogan is rushing to the back of the hall, reciting lyric inspirational poetry, and suddenly I understand everything. The clan is filled with hereditary mages, and I am apparently one of my generation's most powerful; I'm expected to rise one day to lead. The Mercedes family has long been marginalized because their power is weak, but they're planning a coup because unlike most of the families, they actually train in their talents, learning to make the most of what they have. Brogan Mercedes is my rival for leadership of the clan, not very powerful, but very showy and very skilled at what he can do.

Brogan puts the audience in thrall as he infuses strength into the family servant, lifting one trembling fist in a gesture of triumph. The servant groans and strains, and then lifts the heavy glass and silver mirror off of himself, rising and single-handedly returning it to the wall. Brogan turns to me, smirks again, waves his hand at the shattered glass, and spits a final couplet that fuses the shards of shattered glass into a heart-shaped mirror. The Mercedes family erupts in applause for their golden child while the remainder of the gathered clap half-heartedly.

A few elders look to me, disapprovingly. An older woman—likely an aunt, perhaps the mother of the woman with red hair—clucks her tongue at me and chides me for letting Brogan show off and prove he's got the gift. If I'd just lifted the mirror, I could've gotten the applause and put Brogan in his place. I smile back and say that I've forced Brogan to give away his method, that in his haste to demonstrate what he could do, he's revealed his focus, and that now if I need to face him, I know how to put a stop to his powers. This earns me some raised eyebrows and some quiet chuckles as the clan's next leader proves her worth once more.

That's when my body said I'd had enough sleep, and I had work besides. I could try to analyze this one, and there are just enough hooks to point me in the right direction, but I'm loath to spoil what was in all other regards this really awesome hidden-reality vision of modern people in fin de siècle clothing and magic and internecine feuding.

In other news, Jessie and I have once again surfed the Luck Plane.

Those who've been following the continuing saga know that I filed bankruptcy, and that I surrendered the house. As part of my bankruptcy plan, I had to keep paying the utilities on the property until the bank got around to the
foreclosure. That, as it turned out, would be a long and arduous process. They told me that, because I was still in bankruptcy, they were legally obliged to leave me alone and not contact me or do anything with or to the house or mortgage. I didn't have to pay, of course, and they weren't going to ask me to do so, but they also had a backlog of cases to resolve and weren't in any hurry to deal with me because of the bankruptcy flag. Thus, I thought I'd be in a state of limbo for a while, paying for utilities on two places.

One of the bills on my list of obligations was, of course, the combined water/sewer/trash bill. The trash portion of the bill was a non-negotiable seventy-seven dollars and twenty-five cents, and I even called to try to get that relieved but met a brick wall. The water/sewer portion, however, was a negligible amount, perhaps fifty dollars each every three months to cover the water that evaporated out of the heating system or flowed through the pipes to keep them from freezing in winter. I wrote off the bill every quarter as an annoyance, but not really anything I could fix for several months at a minimum.

Last Saturday, I received a bill from the Borough of Pottstown for one month's water/sewer/trash, not three. The bill amount was USD5977.20. That's over an order of magnitude greater than the last bill, for one-third of the time. The bill also tells me how much water that is, and according to the meter, I used 968,660 gallons of water. In a month.

On Thilya, I called the utility department and asked them to check the meter. The clerk said that she'd be glad to help out, since this was "highly abnormal," and that they'd call be back in a few days to tell me what the real reading on the meter was.

Bralya morning, she woke me up with a call at 08h00, telling me that she was sorry to call so early, but that she had authorized the utility department to turn off the water at the street, because "the agent that went out to read the meter said he could hear water running inside the house, and the meter was even higher than before." I told her she did the right thing, and that I'd have to call my lawyer to find out next steps. She asked me when I'd be able to come out and have a plumber find out what was wrong, and I took the five minutes to explain the whole story to her. At the end, she replied with a quiet "oh" and then thanked me for letting her know before ending the call.

My lawyer didn't have great news for me at first; the bill was obviously mine to handle, because I was obligated to pay the utilities. However, when I told him of the "running water" bit, he said I needed to contact
Countrywide as soon as possible to let them know there might be damage to the property and that they might take care of things, but he didn't leave me with a lot of hope on the matter. I called Countrywide on Thursday afternoon, but I spent half an hour in IVR-hell and then gave up.

Kimya morning, I managed to get through to an operator and got the name of the specialist assigned to my case. I then proceeded to get him on the phone with me, live, and give him a fast synopsis of the problem, ending the explanation with "you need to do something because Countrywide's investment here is at potential risk of damages." His response was, essentially, to tell me that anything I had been told prior about his company not being able to do anything because of my bankruptcy was crap. He said that, as my surrender of the property was in an approved plan, that was as good as relief from stay in the eyes of the law and that he was going to file the paperwork to move me out of bankruptcy status. He told me to call back in a week, and that I should be able to get through to general customer service instead of the bankruptcy department. They would then be able to tell me where to send the bill and everything else.

So, by Slacking off, I've been able to pass the buck on some kind of major plumbing disaster at my old property, sidestep a six-thousand-dollar bill, jump the queue on the foreclosure track, drop some karma on the mortgage company that would still be getting paid if only they'd negotiated a short sale in the first place, and leave a mess for somebody else to clean.

I feel like I ought to feel bad about my failure to be the responsible adult in this situation, but I'm too busy bathing in schadenfreude to care.

I'm into making lampshades out of the skin of "just his way"people.

0003 Yortera 04: Blur

2008-03-20T23:26:00.000-07:00

First of all, happy belated Thilafa to everyone! Our cleaning came early, in the form of making Jessie's studio a habitable space for two people again, which is all kinds of awesome. Now I can sit next to her and yell at her instead of doing it from the living room! In all seriousness, though, this really has made a huge difference in both of our lives, being able to spend time together in the same room, even if we don't work on the same things together all the time.

The calendar isn't forgotten or abandoned, nor is anything else. Right now, the order of the day is... well, I'd have to call it "rebuilding," but that's not quite the right word. The truth is while everything is going absolutely swimmingly in terms of our immediate finances, we're still in a much more precarious position than I would like. We have no credit and no cushion on which to fall in case something bad happens, and I'm much too keenly aware of Coyote's eyes on the back of my head than to tempt fate and suggest that nothing will go wrong. I've done that before; I know better now. At the moment I'm socking away a good chunk of change every month, I'm paying off the bankruptcy, and we're doing what we can to watch spending without turning into hermit crabs. Negotiations are underway to greatly increase our quality of life, but little enough should be said on those until they actually come to pass.

Actually, the real reason I'm updating is because I happened to run across a piece of information that I think needs to be shared, not just with my immediate circle but out into the wider world: Labor of Love, a real-life story of a happily married transman who opted to stop taking his testosterone and become pregnant to carry the child that his wife could not.

It's unfortunately rare that something happens that causes people to reconsider how they view the world. Most people, confronted with new ideas, merely filter them through the lens of pre-existing decisions. Anything that causes cognitive dissonance simply gets rejected as "wrong" or "immoral." I'm under no delusions that this will do anything else, but I can hold out hope that maybe this will be the trigger that forces at least a few people to really
start thinking about the interplay of sex and gender, and how destructive these things can be for some people.

What is a male, really? We as a society, as a people, do very poorly when trying to explain this idea, this concept of "man" as distinct from "woman" or from "person." We hold up procreation, differences in thought and mind, historical and biological perspective, and all manner of religious pronouncement to divide one from the other, and yet in the end, we really have done little more but paint two rooms in different colors and called that a meaningful distinction. Is this really all there is to our view of male and female?

To be sure, there are underlying biological distinctions that can be drawn, and these should be important. Genuine issues of health and physical well-being arise when talking of how to treat one versus another, and these distinctions are non-trivial. However, they are also non-applicable outside of that realm, and yet we continue to try to propagate these biological notions of sex into some sort of meaningful social context, as though the presence or absense of any one of a number of physical or genetic markers is somehow indicative of a deeper pattern.

The problem, really, is not that we have ideas of "male" and "female". It's that we have so many different ideas of them and yet we have no way to reconcile them all. A person can be genetically male, hormonally female, physically male, and emotionally ambiguous, and yet this same person is expected to compress these near-orthogonal states of being into a single false dichotomy. Worse, many places consider this answer immutable, and almost all consider at most a single state change to be legitimate. Where is the place for those who simply can't answer the question "are you male XOR female" with anything other than "mu"?

Often, when these sorts of issues arise, I heard it asked if I think it's fair to expect people who have no experience with these issues and can be reasonably expected never to deal with them to have to change their worldview to accomodate the extreme minority that this sort of issue impacts. To these people, I can only ask whether they consider us worthy of equality of not. Do these people expect me to respect their decision to be treated as male or female, to not simply refer to them all as "sir" or "ma'am," whichever least matches their presentation that day? Or worse, to simply decide at a whim which to use, and change my mind and pronouns for them daily? Do they expect me to grant them their gender and respect their decision not to question their biology? Do they expect me to their their claims of being gendered seriously when they've never seriously considered the implications of their insistence?

When the assumptions of "what is normal" change, so too do the assumptions of what is polite.

And yet, even through all of this, I am left with the dilemma: how do we as a people overcome this normativity that permeates our culture? Do we even bother trying? Do we treat escape from labelling as a TAZ and revel in it when we can do it, with the expectation that we will all return to the Great Lie outside? Do we storm the barricades and refuse to let ourselves be defined in such simplistic falsehoods? Is there even a single right answer to this question, or, like gender itself, do we each have to make it up as we go?

I'd like to think that, collectively, we could make an impact on the larger society, and yet I have to honestly state that our chances of making any real positive impact are probably vanishingly small, while our chances of screwing things up for ourselves is quite comparatively large. Nevertheless, I'd like to think that, in small ways, we are making an impact. With every person refusing to conform to the expected norms, whether from a pregnant transman or a hijra demanding recognition of zir own sex, we're all pushing the boundaries of what is male, what is female, and what is normal.

I doubt I'll see the kinds of change I'd like within my lifetime, but I can dream.

If I could know for certain the real situation behind the curtain....

0002 Lakera 22: Court

2008-02-11T23:19:00.000-08:00

Whenever anybody says "court," there is a certain set of images and expectations that evolve out of this. This is part and parcel of having a connotative language. Running strictly by the denotative sense, of course, "court" is really just a venue, a location where proceedings occur. However, far more than the strict physical locale comes to mind—at least to my mind; your results may vary—when someone suggests something is to happen in or at court.

So, that in mind, the experience of going to the "bankruptcy court" today was very little like what I expected it to be. This is not a complaint, really, so much as it's just something I consider noteworthy.

Now, it should be noted that over the weekend, I managed to throw off my sleep schedule somewhat. Again, no complaints in the slightest about it, so much as this is important to set the stage for things to come. I did my level best to reset things prior to Thilya morning, but it simply did not happen. At 02h00, I was still fairly wide-awake and tossing and turning in bed, unable to rest. I asked Jessie—herself suffering even worse than I for being circadian-deficient—to lie down with me for a bit, and I did eventually pass out, but when I woke up this morning at 06h00, I was quite literally unable to function. I managed to hit the snooze bar once, hoping the problem would resolve itself, and then to reset the alarm for an extra hour, but that too failed to solve the problem.

In fact, when I did finally haul my tail out of bed, it was solely because the clock said 07h25, and I knew that if I didn't start the process of getting ready, I would be late. My instructions all said to be at court promptly at 08h30, I knew I had to find parking, and I had to fight morning traffic, which all meant that I needed to be out the door at 07h30 at the absolute latest. Fortunately, I had laid out everything I needed to get myself together the night before. Unfortunately, I had left my laptop lid open from the night before and made the mistake of looking at something while I put on my socks and shoes.

I made it out the door at 07h45, scampering furiously up to Tanya's car to make a mad dash for downtown. Monday morning traffic was light, for a change, but still far thicker than I had hoped, and the whole way there I alternated between grumbling and grousing, still only a third awake and not feeling very comfortable in the only nice shirt I now own which doesn't quite fit because it—like most of my clothing—is too short. Still, I managed to get downtown in a reasonable time and I even found a parking garage across the street that promised not to cost a small fortune since I was there before 09h00 and could get in on their early-riser special.

The federal court building in downtown Seattle is quite nice, though it has the ubiquitous enless army of steps up from the street to impress upon all who go there that Serious Business occurs within, which always is a little off-putting to me. So, too, is the screening procedure through which one must go to get inside. I understand and respect the need for security, but here it was rather silly. You see, the inside of the court building is dominated by a large pond, presumably with fish in it; I didn't look that closely. Then, off to the right of this giant open space is a small walkway in which the police have set up their conveyor belt and their metal detector. Nothing actually prevents anyone from just jumping over the pond other than a desire not to get one's clothes or feet wet, and the likelihood that anyone caught trying to do that will be assumed guilty of something, even if that something is just a harmless prank.

I did think about asking the guards if anyone had ever tried it, but I was already down to five minutes and I still hadn't gotten beeped yet. Instead, I handed over my purse and my paperwork and my jacket and Tanya's keys, and then I went through the metal detector and promptly set it off because I had forgotten to remove Jessie's collar. Now, when I'm going to airports, I know I have to remove it, and I have standing permission to do so when I'm travelling, but honestly it's become such an integral part of me that I don't even really think about it. I don't take it off to sleep, or to bathe, or even apparently to get past a metal detector going into a courthouse.

Thankfully, the security guards were very understanding and let me get away with being wanded rather than having to remove the collar. They were less understanding of the can of soda I brought with me. They asked if I was waiting for a jury summons, but when I said no they told me that I couldn't keep my can and that I'd have to leave it there or throw it away. I'm not sure why a can of soda is a problem, but I'm guessing it's a bludgeoning risk or somesuch. At any rate, I couldn't keep it.

So, as usual, the bad kind of inspiration struck, and I asked if they had a trash can nearby. One of the officers said they had one behind the desk. I couldn't take the can, and I didn't want to leave it or throw it away while full, so I took the only other option: I chugged it. I will state here for the record that Black Cherry Fresca is very fizzy, as in burns-the-nose carbonated, but having already set myself up for a Bad Idea, I was going to follow through with it. The police started to applaud when I got onto the fourth and final tilt, draining the can dry in about ten seconds. One of them said with a smile, "you went to college, didn't you?" Another accepted the empty can from me and pointed me towards the bathrooms.

My lawyer called me as I was getting into the elevator to get up to the floor with the bankruptcy court. The clock said exactly 08h31.

Now, having gone through all of this to get to the courthouse on-time, I have to say that the process itself was... shockingly short. I was quite literally in and out in half an hour. The first fifteen minutes went to the attorney for the bankruptcy trustee talking about the proceedings, and then calling two names for people who weren't there. I was third on the list, and by 08h45 I was seated at a small table with my attorney, the trustee's attorney, and a clerk of the court taking notes. The trustee's attorney asked me a few quick questions about the accuracy and completeness of the paperwork, we made one quick amendment to the plan to remove a claim that Tanya's employer is paying but for which I had to co-sign, and then I was done.

I'd expected to be sitting in a courtroom pew all day waiting to get up and do the whole witness thing and see a judge and all that. The whole affair was rather... anticlimactic.

Still, I was glad for it, as it meant I could come home and curl up next to Jessie and get a nap. I'll still sleep well tonight, but I was a very tired buni still, and I was glad for the fact that I had taken the day off of work in anticipation of having to be sequestered for most of it. It gave me a chance to sequester myself when I got home, and I needed it.

Now all I have to do is... pay off the remaining debt. This is actually the easy part. At a thousand a month, I'll be free and clear in just over a year, and I can easily spare that much. I won't even really have to panic
too much over Anthrocon, though I'm going to have to engage in some fancy financing tricks to pay for the plane tickets while they cheap, since I don't have a credit card any more. That, however, is only a minor hiccough in the plans, and then we should be ready to go.

From the rooftops, shout it out.

Having been somewhat off-kilter for the last few days, Jessie and I had done more than our share of eating out over the weekend. So, we both agreed that tonight we wouldn't be going anywhere, or even ordering take-out, once we decided that it could be füd tiem nao plz. However, right after this proclamation, we noticed that, while we had many things that could be used to make food, we didn't really have anything that would qualify as food outright. We had a lot of ingredients, but no obvious combination of them that could be added up to a known meal.

Thus, it became time to prepare Emergency Food.

Emergency Food differs from Regular Food in that Regular Food starts with a known outcome, like "lasagna" or "chicken pot pie" or even "taco-don", then proceeds to the gathering or assembling of ingredients, and onto cooking and then presentation and consumption. The root of Regular Food is the meal, an end-goal around which ingredients are planned.

Emergency Food, in contrast, starts with a list of ingredients and then proceeds directly into cooking, with the hope the outcome will be some form of success. For those of you familiar with World Tree, Emergency Food is to sponting what Regular Food is to actual spells. You aren't working from a known recipe, so much as you're throwing together a bunch of stuff that you're pretty sure ought to go together in this fashion, but you've never really tried it before, or at least you've never written it down anywhere.

So, tonight's dinner ended up being Sponted Stew. Because it is sponted, you can't really have a recipe, but nevertheless I shall recreate the process by which this came about:

Stare at your canned-goods shelf for a long time and hope that something eventually falls out that makes some semblance of sense. Select one can each of carrots, green beans, and peas. Consider the can of beets curiously, start to pick it up, and then put it down again.
Ignore your mate's attempts at levity when she starts pulling ingredients at random off the shelves. Attempt to impart through the medium of a single wordless expression the idea that if she keeps you from cooking, she gets to eat cold cereal without any milk and maybe a can of refried beans with Triscuits for dinner.
Remember that you have chicken in the freezer and cans of chicken broth on the shelf, as well as a blue cylinder of Wondra on the spice shelf and some butter in the fridge, which means you can make chicken with gravy and vegetables, which everyone in the apartment who is not a jackal with an anti-vegetable field should eat. The anti-veg jackal has already started a personal pizza in the oven and has removed herself from the Emergency Food process.
Carry the cans to the counter and open them. Drain the liquid out of them and pour their contents into a glass bowl that you find under the counter.
Ask your mate to come back out of her studio and get her to start making rice in the ricer. Grumble quietly when she suggest that the liquid from the canned vegetables could have been used to flavor the rice and retain some of the nutrients that got poured out. If you have Time 2 or Ruloc Tempador, send a message to yourself back on step four to save the liquid.
Open the freezer to get out the frozen chicken and remember that chicken gravy really doesn't work so well; cream gravy works a lot better. Close the freezer and open the fridge to get out the milk that isn't there. If you have Correspondence 2 or Mutoc Locador, get the milk out of the dairy case at the store instead. If not, close the fridge and change your plan to the pound of beefs sitting in the door, since beef gravy works fine with beefs.
Start the ground beef defrosting and get out some butter to brown it. Find a clean pot or wash one, put the butter in the pot, and then go and confirm that you actually have beef broth as well as chicken. If you have Time 4 or Ruloc Tempador, do this before starting the beefs to defrost.
Once the beefs are defrosted, brown them in butter and then drain well, adding the beefs to the glass bowl and the fat to the can that you didn't throw away after pouring the vegetables out of it. If you had Forces 3 or a good amount of Creoc Pyrador, you can bypass the need for a stove here.
Wash the now-empty pot in which you browned your beefs; for this, you may have to rearrange dirty dishes in the sink and wash your hands if you don't have Matter and Life each at 2, or else a good amount of Creoc Aquador or maybe some Destroc Corpador. Either way, combine butter and flour into a roux in the clean pot.
Stir continuously with a utensil in one hand if you can't set up some Forces effects or else Ruloc Corprador to keep the stirring-thing moving in the pot to keep. Slowly add your beef broth to your roux and then stir some more. Did I mention to stir? Keep stirring it and add more broth, a little at a time. You may want to stir at this point. No really. If you don't keep stirring and add the liquid slowly, you will get lumps, and then you either have to go back with Time 4 or Mutoc Tempador and stir to keep them from forming or else you have to really Matter or Mutoc Corprador to get the lumps out after they've formed, and you don't want that, so keep stirring.
Once your beef broth and your roux are combined into a gravy, decide that it's not thick enough and add more flour. You will need about three hands' worth of stirring at this point, and you only have two, so you're going to get lumps anyway. Deal with them as mentioned above. Add black pepper and oregano to the gravy to help convert the meal from "heavy" to "hearty."
Pour your hopefully-not-too-lumpy gravy over the combined beefs and vegetables. Gently fold the ingredients together in the bowl, as you have just about filled it to capacity. Correspondence 1 or Creoc Locador can be helpful in expanding the volume of the bowl to make this step simpler.
Discover that the rice is just about ready. If it's not, then you should have used Time 1 or Kennoc Tempador to figure out when you should have asked your mate to start the rice to make sure everything lines up right. Call everyone into dinner. Serves enough, with leftovers.

0002 Indera 21: Holidays

2008-01-13T23:08:00.000-08:00

Joyous Athamara to everyone! I know sending out seasons' greetings after the holiday is over is usually a bit tacky, but this year things got so hectic, I totally forgot to say something in advance. I didn't even get to hang up any paper chains, and my gifts for folks really were slapdash at best. I suck as founding holidays. Well, truth is, I'm apparently pretty good at it, so much so that other folks actually did a better job of celebrating it than I did this time around.

Actually, the truth is that things have been really... um... weird. I know I haven't written anything in several months, and I'm not particularly happy with myself about that. The sad truth is that silence is it's own worst feedback mechanism. Say nothing, and no-one replies. No-one replying means nobody's listening, and if no-one is listening then there's no reason to speak, is there? Consciously, I know that's not true, but it's a hard voice to try to override with just words and some attempts at self-pepping.

No, nothing bad has happened between Jessie and I. We continue to grow together, laugh together, love together. Life with her is a blessèd thing, and I continue to treasure every moment I get with her. Most days, I feel like this is entirely too few for anyone's good, but I keep steady with thoughts of retirement and one day having all the time we want to spend together. This may drive us both mad. Time will tell.

Anyway, I suppose I should go into a bit of depth as to why I've been silent for so long. It really isn't good to leave anyone, myself included, hanging, and the story has only gotten more interesting with time. As folks might remember, I mentioned several months ago that my finances were in a state that could best be described as Slow Leak. With both a mortgage payment and a monthly rent bill, I was losing about three hundred a month, then making up about ninety percent of it all on bonus checks and the occasional boost in roommate rent. While not tenable for the long run, we were making do, though constantly in a state of "we really can't afford this," whatever it happened to be.

Now, contracts with realtors usually expire on or around 180-day intervals, and on Pyevera 6 (October 6 Gregorian) my contract with my realtor was set to run out. Fourteen months by any calendar, and no real motion on the house, with no end in sight to the collapse of the housing market. I owed more on the property than any sane investor site said the house was worth, and nobody in zir right mind wanted to move to Pottstown anyway.

On Pyevera 1, we got an offer. It was for USD90,000, far less than I owed, but it was a solid offer, a genuine offer, with earnest money and a contract and everything. My realtor said the buyer was "highly motivated" and wanted to close a deal in two weeks. Jessie and I were elated. Ecstatic. Near-delirious with joy. An end to our ordeal!

Now all we had to do was navigate the precarious waters known in real estate terms as the "short sale." As can be surmised from its name, a short sale happens when the seller of a property goes to the bank and asks to be released from a portion of debt as part of a sale transaction. Banks do not like short sales, but under many conditions they will be glad to accept them, such as, for example, an alternative to foreclosing on a property in default, or as part of a legally-mandated sale as part of a divorce or other legal proceeding, or when the market has so grossly overvalued a house at some point in the past that any attempt to recoup those losses through a legitimate business transaction could only meet in resounding failure.

Yeah, I was dreaming, too. With my father's help, I put together a plan to pay off my second mortgage and offer a short sale to the bank on the first that left a mere twenty-thousand dollars to be forgiven, an amount that I was willing to claim on my taxes if it meant no longer being burdened by a vacant house on the opposite coast. I thought, silly me, that if I presented it to the bank in a rational and lucid manner, they would have no choice but to agree that forgiving twenty grand would be far favorable to keeping such a risky property on the books.

Oh, how wrong I was.

For starters, CitiMortgage, my second mortgage holder, simply refused to discuss short sales. Ever. On each of the first five or six attempts I made to speak with a representative about short sales, all anyone would ever tell me was "fill out the workout packet and fax it to us; someone will call you." No-one ever did. Then, on about the sixth or seventh attempt, when I finally blew my stack at someone, I got a supervisor on the phone who simply told me that Citi categorically refuses to authorize short sales for second mortgages, and explained quite bluntly that by doing so they guaranteed either that they were paid in full or that their clients were forced into foreclosure to prevent the first mortgage company from benefitting. They called this a win-win situation.

Countrywide, my primary mortgage holder, was more lenient, by which I mean they were actually willing to let me submit a short sale plan and a hardship letter. However, after receiving it and running all the numbers through their spreadsheets, they decided that they, too, were going to hold out for full payoff, and insisted that I make a counteroffer.

I explained to the negotiator quite clearly and using multiple phrases that there was no more money on my side of the table with which to make such an offer. I had brought one-hundred-twenty percent of my available resources to bear in the initial plan by securing a guarantee from my father for some help, and that left us completely tapped, financially.

The negotiator said in response to this that we should force Citi to accept the short sale, then, since they were the second mortgage company, and my financial obligations were to Countrywide first and foremost.

I said that Citi had refused to negotiate a short sale under any condition precisely because they were the second mortgage company and it made no financial sense for them to do so.

The negotiator then made the vocal equivalent of a shrug and said she couldn't help me. She offered to leave my file open for a week, but said that she'd have to close it after that and I'd have to go through "a process" to get it opened again. She did not say what that process was.

Now, it's worth noting at this point that Countrywide said they couldn't turn around a short sale in anything less than forty-five days. I tried to explain multiple times that I had a buyer that might walk if the bank took too long. At every point in this process, I warned Countrywide—and Citi, though I had fewer opportunities to do so—that I was rapidly running out of capacity to continue to pay the mortgage, and that I had successfully juggled things this long by racking up credit card debt to keep my mortgage current. This, obviously, could not last forever, and was nearing the cutoff point past which I would have to take drastic measures.

Countrywide's response to this was, and I quote, "We're willing to take that risk."

So, starting with the mid-Fathera payment, I quit paying my mortgage. At first, I was working from an assumption—a valid one, I would later learn—that part of the reason they were so unwilling to work with me on resolving this little financial crisis was that my account with them was in good standing. It seems so backwards, and yet at the same time I can see the twisted logic of it. As long as you pay on time, play by the rules, and do nothing to rock the boat, banks and possibly other large institutions are more prone to look at you as an annuity payment than as a customer. Their assumption about you as a person is that you'll continue to make payments on time and that they don't have to treat you well for you to do the right thing. Their interests are focused instead on the people who rack up huge debts and then don't pay, because it's there that these financial groups stand to actually lose money.

Never mind the fact that if they didn't lend money to people who did that in the first place, they'd have fewer problems. That, dear friends, is an argument for another day.

At any rate, not handing over a lot of money to Countrywide felt really good, and I kept it up for a few weeks, riding pretty high on the emotional lift that giving The Man the finger had given me. Of course, this also added to my stress levels pretty severely, which is one reason I haven't produced a lot of writing lately. Bunnies don't make good anarchists, though I did a pretty good imitation of one for a while.

Now, after a few months of this, I'm sure everyone can imagine just how happy the bank was to talk with me, especially when you consider the fact that I had done this deliberately to yank their short-and-curlies to get their attention. Starting around early Ertera, I started getting the phone calls from their pressure-folks asking when I'd be making a payment and would I like to set one up now while they have me on the phone. This went on for a few weeks, and then I had an epiphany: this wasn't going to get any better.

So, I declared bankruptcy.

Now, I say that like it's a cakewalk. It's actually something that takes some time. You can't just walk into town square and declare yourself to be broke. In this state, you have to go to a lawyer, you have to take a course in responsible finances, you have to submit forms detailing everything you own, you have to find your tax returns for the last two years, and you have to prove that you aren't just doing this to spite someone, even if you are. However, I found a nice lawyer who was very willing to help walk me through the whole process, and together we worked out that, yes, filing for Chapter 13 did actually make a lot of sense, especially if we could beat the bank to the foreclosure.

See, the bankruptcy laws have some interesting rules. One is that if you have a debt backed by an asset—a secured debt—you can choose under bankruptcy to surrender the asset as full payment for the debt, regardless of the relative value of the asset and the debt at the time of surrender. That is, by declaring bankruptcy, I can just give the house back to the bank and they're legally obligated to accept it in full compensation for the money I owe them through the mortgage. They can't actually ask for any more money, since hey, they got the house.

If I'd waited for the bank to foreclose to declare bankruptcy, things would not have gone so smoothly. What happens under this condition is messy, but suffice to say I would have ended up having to pay a lot more money than I wanted. Anthrocon would have been out for about five years, as would a lot of other things.

Now, I do have some other debts besides the house that the bankruptcy court will force me to pay back, since credit card debt is all unsecured and I can't just walk away from it with the money I make. However, even if I'm forced to pay it back at maximum rate, I'm pinching pennies for a year and then I'm completely out of debt with no mortgage to worry about. Under the plan I've submitted, I'm out in a year-and-a-half, with lots of pocket change in the meantime. It's possible the court may force me to pay back faster than I'd like, but that just means less time in the plan.

In fact, the worst thing about this whole situation, really, is that for the next seven years I have a black mark on my ~~aura~~ credit report indicating that I have ~~committed Diablerie~~ declared bankruptcy, which will make it harder for me to ~~avoid a Blood Hunt~~ get loans. However, I can rebuild my actual credit score in about two years, less with some help from friends and family. More on that in another post. Really, given the ~~expanded Blood Pool and increased Disciplines~~ fiscal benefits, ~~consuming my Sire~~ declaring bankruptcy is probably the best thing I could've done in this situation.

The best part is that I signed all the paperwork last Thilya, which means this was an awesome Athamara present to myself and the rest of the Embassy.

Speaking of Athamara, actually, I can't thank enough all the people who actually took me seriously and helped me create this wonderful holiday. Thanks to Cobaltie and Zander for coming out this way to visit. Thanks also to Zander for the rare scarlet emerald! Who only knows what I'll be able to summon with it! Thanks to Tanya for the vintage slang deck; murder but it's the most! Thanks to Orbus and Mufi for the copy of World Tree! Thanks especially to Bard for the signed copy of Marriage of Insects! I very much look forward to reading it!

I got very little for folks. I suck. I did, however, provide a place for people to congregate and hosted Zander's visit to Seattle. I hope that, Grey Sky notwithstanding, we convinced the mad scientist to become "our
resident mad scientist." Too soon to tell, but scheduling a blue sky and a trip to Ivar's Brunch Buffet on the final day may have been a good selling point.

Now, all this may sound like skittles and beer, and not really the cause for radio static, but the truth is it's all been very stressful, and I've been pretty much spending my evenings coming home and vegetating. Plus, the work situation is getting... odd. I dare not say "untenable," because it's still very manageable. However, it's becoming increasingly clear that the new CIO and the people he's hired to help convert T-Mobile from being a small-fast-lean company into being a large-established-conventional industry leader have a very different vision for what a good company is than I do. To illustrate this, I point no further than the fact that when we as a company scored lower-than-expected on our employee satisfaction survey, his response was to buy a copy of Who Moved My Cheese? and to tell us all at our quarterly all-hands meeting that their poor grade was because of our failure to properly embrace the changes they made to the company.

I haven't quit outright, but I did have my first interview outside T-Mobile in almost three years. It hurts, letting go, but at the same time, I'm not so sure I feel like waiting to see if this guy gets fired before he ~~screws up anything else~~ finishes implementing his vision.

Also, somewhere in all of this the Lapinian Embassy celebrated its largest ~~Rocksgiving West~~ Bandaza ever. Rather than try to recollect two months back with crystal clarity, let me just provide a quick rundown:

Thirteen people showed up.
Two tofurkeys actually made it to the table.
Five pounds of potatoes got mashed.
Multiple people rocked out with our East Coast counterparts.
One fursuiter attended and briefly played drums in-suit.
Six pumpkin pies met a timely and delicious fate.
One giant spice cake and several other desserts also vanished.
Several people stayed multiple days to help with leftovers.
The last of the dishes are just now being resolved.

As noted at the time, this almost turned out more like Thanksgivicon Zero than anything else. Next year, we may do conbooks.

Finally, I have been Sick. Now, when I say sick, I don't just mean a sniffle, a cough, or some funky discharges. I'm talking about full-blown lungbutter, technicolor sputum the consistency of semi-set Jell-O, night sweats, and the occasional thirty-eight degree fever. I have, in fact, been in one form of ill health from Rachel's return from MFF through to... um... today. I'm still coughing, still have a sore throat, and still wake up with the occasional bout of nasty throat crap that has to be coughed free. Yes, I've been to a doctor, and she told me that I probably had a really nice case of bronchitis on top of sinusitis, and that from here there's nothing more I can do besides lozenges, pain killers, and cough suppressants when I need them. I'm quite literally sick of being sick at this point.

And that's what's been up. In retrospect, it doesn't sound like a lot, but when you mix it in with everything else that has to happen in the ordinary course of living one's life, it's really quite a lot, or at least it felt like it at the time. I can only hope that I'll be better in the future about keeping people apprised of what's going on in a timely fashion. I know I've said that before, though, and all I can do is say that I'm aware of how poorly I do this. Most of my friends tend to update their diaries on a much more frequent basis, and I tend to save up for larger posts, so I always feel like I'm "the quiet one." That's probably not going to change any time soon.

P.S. I won't be at FC this year, or probably any year, really. If I'm going to take off a week for my own private holiday, it's really hard to get another week less than a month later, no matter how much time in advance I give notice. You guys are just going to have to move the con.

0002 Vasera 21: Calendar

2007-09-23T23:01:00.000-07:00

So, it's only been two months this time. I'm improving. Sort of.

The house still hasn't sold; it's now a year on the market, with no movement. I've dropped the price on it enough that I can basically throw the remnants of the mortgage onto my credit cards and max them out to cover the costs, and if things get really ugly I can probably drop it again by borrowing money from my dad and cashing out my 401(k). I'm not in favor of either option, but if I have to do it to make things work, I will. Things are getting a bit desperate around the Lapinian Embassy.

Actually, that's not entirely true. Things here are pretty much exactly where they were six months ago, which is to say that we're good but we're not really moving forward except at a speed I could only describe as "glacial." That is, of course, not counting global warming in the speed estimation. Melting glaciers move quite fast. The housing market, however, is not. And thus we're pretty much exactly where we were before, financially.

Beautiful World continues to thrive at least between my ears. I know what needs to happen in part seven, but I'm trying to find the right frame of reference for the events that actually shows what needs to be shown without giving away too much. That's going to take a bit of creative fiddling, and I think I know what I'm going to do, but I have to find the time to sit down and do it.

Instead of working on that, however, today I finally sat down and developed the Lapinian date converter. It does pretty much what it says on the tin. It's very bare-bones at the moment, at least by my standards, but it will accomplish the following:

Display the current year by default, all 364 or 371 days, with holidays and Gregorian conversions in the panels.
Accept as input any positive or negative integer and show that Lapinian year instead.
Ignore any input other than positive or negative integers and substitute the last-good input value.

I've made a few revisions since the last time I talked about the calendar. Most notably, I've amended the names of the months with the -er- notation. Since the word for "month" in Lapinian is lera, it made sense upon reflection to adjust the names of the months to use the terminology, much as the Romans used "-ember" after the numbers to mark off the months that didn't have better names.

Treva became Jevera, mostly because I dislike that "tr" letter combination; about the only way to pronounce it properly as the alveolar plosive plus the alveolar approximant in a single syllable is to slide a post-alveolar fricative in the middle, meaning the result inevitably sounds more like "tchr" than anything else. If you don't believe me, listen to the variances in the way people say the word "tree." The j is a voiced postalveolar affricate, which if I were to write out phonetically would be dzh, but that doesn't look normal to anyone who isn't a linguistics wonk or else is Hungarian and is used to dzs. Just think of it like either j in "judge" and you'll be fine. Also, I added the -er- construction like I did for all the months.

Pyera became Pyevera instead of Pyerera simply because too many approximants in a row tend over time to get blended into single syllables. Plus, I liked the way it looked better.

Totally aside from everything else, the th in Thilya is meant to be pronounced voicelessly, like "thin". If I want the voiced version as in "that," I'll write it dh. Yes, I am crazy.

Also, since nobody ever jumped and tried to figure what the names of the months meant, I'll go ahead and give away the secret. Each of the months is named for a food that a bunny might find during that month:

Yortera: Month of Carrots (Wortel)
Zelera: Month of Celery (Zeller)
Dalera: Month of Dandelions (Dahloi)
Byetera: Month of Beets (Biet)
Jevera: Month of Clover (Trefle)
Radera: Month of Radishes (Raidis)
Vasera: Month of Basil (Vasilico)
Pyevera: Month of Peppers (Pieru)
Fathera: Month of Grasses (Fath)
Ertera: Month of Peas (Aert)
Indera: Month of Endive (Indivia)
Lakera: Month of Broccoli (Laker)
Kolera: Month of Cabbage (Kohl)

Finally, to the people who wished me a happy birthday on Thursday, I'm incredibly appreciative. Thank you for the kind wishes. That said, with the advent of the Lapinian calendar, I've decided that I'm actually going to be
celebrating my birthday on the Lapinian schedule, which means next Kimya—Friday for those of you on the Gregorian—is actually the proper anniversary. I was born on 0031 Vasera 26 PLC (Pre-Lapinian Calendar), and what kind of futurist nerd would I be if I didn't actually use the calendar I'd developed? =n.n=

Yes, I know the underlying site still uses the Gregorian. That's because I haven't yet coded up a utility to replace "date" at the command line. What I should do is migrate the entire site into a database, with an external engine for rendering any arbitrary text segment with appropriate links. That, however, will take more time.

Like sands through an hourglass....

0002 Jevera 15: Behind

2007-07-23T22:56:00.000-07:00

Three months.

In some ways, I feel as though this entry should start with an apology. I really haven't been as diligent as I would like about posting regularly and keeping people informed of my life and my goings-on. It's not that I don't think my life is interesting, but... well, for the last few months, it's very much felt like large chunks of my life were "on hold," waiting for something to happen.

The house in Pottstown is still mine, legally. I'm still paying USD1600, give or take, every month for the privilege of owning a house in which I don't live. Around the beginning of July, I finally converted the place to a rental property to try to offset the mortgage costs, and almost immediately I had a tenancy offers through a management company. We did some negotiations with the renters' agent, and we had just worked out a deal that hopefully would have proven amenable to all parties when the borough stepped into the mess and announced that I had not secured something called a "Usage and Occupancy Inspection" that would cost thirty-five more dollars and could not be performed for several weeks because of a backlog of requests. At this point, I cannot shake the notion that the borough management, having realized their own coming obsolescence in the wake of the Robot Revolution, is now doing its level best to squeeze every last drop of liquid capital out of the system before their government is eliminated. It really does feel as though they're punishing people who choose to invest there. Maybe they're trying to punish me for leaving.

In any event, the rental of the house—to this tenant group, at least—is now on hold pending the U&O. However, according to my realtor, this may prove to be a blessing in disguise, as someone else has contacted him about whether the property is still vacant who may be interested in buying it. Now, I am no stranger to people wanting to buy the place, but everyone to date that's expressed interest has done so as an investor offering a ridiculously low purchase price, below what I would need to pay off my home loan, and so I said no. This might actually be a real buyer interested in, you know, owning the house. If so, I wish the person or persons in question the best of luck. This isn't any sort of official offer letter. In fact, it's more like the sort of thing a realtor might say to keep a homeseller from becoming discouraged and hiring somebody with a decoherence beam to remove the house from realspace in a fit of pique.

As amusing anecdote related to the above, in looking for the link in Miracle of Science to illustrate the decoherence beam, I picked the page with the initial shot fired out of an archive indexed only by page number on the first click. I do have good reading retention skills, but that's a bit too creepy for me. The first signs of SMRD, perhaps? I can only hope.

City of Heroes is starting to lose a bit of its shine. The introduction of crafting, even the "crafting lite" of the Inventions System has pushed me into a strange headspace. I've become somewhat taken in by the numbers of it all. I'm asking questions like "just how high can I push my base accuracy?" and "just how fast can I get those powers to recharge?" instead of more important ones like "what happened to this person in his past to convince him that beating on cops, even corrupt ones, was a good idea?" or "what does she do when she's taken off the cape at the end of the day?" It's a little distressing, really. I got into the game for the chance to RP, but I'm turning it into a grindhouse simply because looking at ways I can optimize my performance is part of how I play every game. It's one of the reasons Jessie quit playing SSBM with me, and why I spod in RPs. Back when CoX had one optimal configuration, I used it and that was that. Every power pretty much had one ideal setup, and there was no thought to how I was going to build my characters. Now I have all these fiddly choices, and I find myself spending more time worrying about them than I do actually roleplaying in the game.

Is it time to quit? I don't know. With the coming of Issue 10, I have ideas for advancements in my characters' personal lives that tie into how the game world continues to evolve, but the truth is that CoH is by and large like eating McDonald's. It's a steady stream of low-grade acknowledgement for my creative endeavors that fills the same emotional need that the homecooked meal of writing does, nowhere near as good for me but much easier to acquire. I'm glad for the friendships I've made while playing the game, and the chance to namedrop a few fairly relevant writers as the result of my in-game efforts is pretty cool, but I recognize that the time I spend playing it is time I'm not spending on other things that in the long run are far more important.

At the very least, it may be time to cut back. I'm picking up Dark Cloud 2 again, for the first time in years. I've pretty much played the game to exhaustion, and yet like Symphony of the Night, I personally find a lot of replay value in it. I wish more console games used the same design elements. I'd keep going with Disgaea 2, but outside the teensy little snag of not knowing where my copy is, I've also hit the point at which I've played
the main storyline through to nausea, but I have yet to hit the minimum level necessary to take on the Land of Carnage. I suppose I could go through the Dark World levels, but truth be told I don't feel like spending the time it would take to unlock every map and short of doing so I'm going to feel like I'm skipping things, which makes my poor obsessive-compulsive head hurt. In fact, I'm horribly behind on console games in general. I never picked up Shadow Hearts 3, Silent Hill 4,, or Persona 3. Those are on my list of somedays, but a large part of why I never got them ties back not only into my CoH time—see above—but also my financial situation with the house—see above that.

In fact, it ties in general into the sense of being in a holding pattern again. Really, I'm making do in my current living arrangement, with Tanya and Rachel helping cover bills and Jessie keeping me sane, but I really don't feel like I'm making any progress, and it's starting to really bother me. To be sure, I am getting ahead, but it's slow, and that's frustrating. Once the house is gone—or at least rented—that's half or more of the financial bleeding that I can staunch immediately, and that will turn around our entire situation, but until that happens it's just sitting here idling, waiting for the time to come. I'm sick of waiting.

Until that day....

In other news, the game that I had started back in Pottstown and ran for over eighteen months, Kiss of Heaven, finally wound to a close. For those to whom I said nothing about the game, this was no attempt to exclude you, but it started as a tabletop game and evolved into an online game only after half the players and the GM moved to the opposite side of the country. The one-sentence summary of the plot would be, "Can a group of artificially-created animal uplifts who suddenly develop super powers stop a mad scientist from mass genocide and forced evolution of the survivors?" and I totally based it on Nightmare City and Savior Cat. It was meant to be dark furry superhero anime, with a few brief stops
in post-apocalyptic urban survival and military espionage.

On the whole, I think the game went very well. As always, very little of what I actually planned to happen happened, but the main plot points came about in more or less the right order, and by all indication almost everybody enjoyed it. I did play fast and loose with the rules, but that was mostly because I wanted KoH to be a collaborative story effort more than a dice-munching exercise. To that end, I was probably more permissive with a few people than I should've been, not suggestive or permissive enough with others, but I think, at the very least, the story that came out of the whole thing was worthwhile.

As my friend Alexandrei loves to reminisce on The War for Sunset, I think The Kiss of Heaven would make a kick-ass novel if I could be bothered writing it. However, that would also require me to secure a lot of outside permission and to try to recreate a lot of the game sessions that took place not online in logs but in person over Cheetos and Dew, and the occasional cheesesteak. Plus, some of the real magic is in the interaction with others, and that's something that a flat story just can't capture.

The game may well have been an excellent example of "You Had To Be There Theatre."

Still, now that it's done, I find myself awash in a mix of emotions. I spent a lot of effort making sure that the game went well, and by the measures I have available to me it did, but near the end we had some interplayer turbulence that made the game difficult, and as we came up to the finale I honestly started to rush things so I could have it finished. I enjoyed putting it all together, and I'd love to do it again some time, but it was a hell of a lot of work and right now what I want more than anything is the chance to take a break from being behind the GM screen and just relaxing into a game with somebody else at the helm.

I know Mike's got his AD&D game, and Zander is talking about doing a Shadowrun game. Anyone else have anything? I've got some open weekends again.

Destiny is calling you: "Obey me or defy me."

0002 Zelera 11: Review

2007-04-26T22:51:00.000-07:00

Bwah.

Six weeks since I've posted anything in my diary. I'd say I'm slipping, but I've actually been updating with other content, for once, which is something I didn't think would be happening again any time soon. So, here's the last-episode recap:

Everything for Anthrocon is prepped. The room is reserved for a week, the plane tickets are for the same time period, and I have ten days of vacation reserved at work. We leave Seattle on the 23rd of Byeta and return on the 2nd of Jeva. For those of you on the Gregorian Calendar, that's July 3 to 10. I've also got a day off of work on either side to make sure I don't immediately compress into a tight ball of shock and misery upon touching ground in Seattle after the closest thing I have to a yearly church retreat.
It still feels a little weird to say it like that, but cons are really the closest thing I get to being in a large crowd of people and yet still feeling like I'm around people who have a hope in hell of understanding. This isn't to say that they will, but it's a damnsight more likely than taking an average random collection of strangers off the street. Of course, when I say "understand," I mean more in the general sense of "empathize with the nature of my existence,"which is a concept that I don't really think we can easily express in English.
I got a FurAffinity account. I did feel kind of dirty about it at first, but a very large part of that stems from the fact that the typical writer on there is... not that good, comparatively speaking. The furry fandom in general is a much more visual medium than it is a verbal one, with the consequence and subsequent cause that the bar for what is considered good writing is a lot lower than the bar for what is considered good illustration. Thus, more people who write mediocre stories get praised for good work, and the bar falls farther, and so on and so forth. So, I was a little leery of even trying to wade into the pool.
Of course, the truth is that I'm already in the pool, and up until now I've really just been sort of standing around sulking that nobody was playing with me and bitching about how bad things are. So, this is really my attempt to jump into the deep end and maybe start reversing the previous trend. It may not work, but if it does then things are great, and if it doesn't then I'm really not out anything except a bit of dignity.
Coincidental with the FA account, I've started a new ongoing storytitled, "Beautifuil World". The history for the setting is... complex. When I was driving cross-country from Pennsylvania to Washington, one of the many topics that arose during the trip was a new MUCK to replace or supplant or support Puzzlebox, and the idea upon which I hit was that of a virtual world in which the inhabitants all knew that they were in a virtual world, and could operate as such. Digital sentiences, hackers, and uploaded minds all interacting in a realm limited only by the creativity of the players involved.
The idea ended up not going anywhere as a MUCK, mostly because I didn't feel like investing the energy to try to create one and code it up and maintain it. However, the idea for the setting remained in my head, lingering around and making faces at the other story settings in which I'd been working. So, with the creation of the new account, I decided to go ahead and indulge the idea and give it a bit of freedom. Since then, I've already written eight-thousand words, which isn't bad at all for me given my usual pace of writing. If I keep this up, I'll have a novel by the end of the summer.
Pathia has moved in with Jessie, Tanya, and I. The apartment's a little cramped, but with some judicious juggling of suitcases and other things, we should be able to wedge everything into the available space. She's already working again, and she seems pleased with that. It's not a brilliant job, but Washington State has some pretty flash labor laws, so she's making decent money.
My job at T-Mobile remains stable, even "good" by some standards. I got a fairly decent raise at my annual review, and tomorrow I'll get a good-sized bonus check that will go a long way towards covering the currently outstanding credit card debt.
The house in Pottstown still hasn't sold, but at least the work is done, and the showings have picked back up. Two last week, and one the week before that actually looked ready to buy until an attack of cold feet occurred. I can't blame them for that; I had a few of those myself when Jessie and I were shopping for a permanent residence.

I think that pretty much covers everything. Anything I've missed, I can add later.

I feel happy.

0001 Kolera 24: Interviews

2007-03-24T22:44:00.000-07:00

So, more "memes". That's not really the appropriate designator for the exercise, but it's the one that's stuck, which makes it the appropriate term, after a fashion. That's the problem with being such a proponent of neologisms, really. It's difficult to argue with so-called "incorrect" uses of language, because if they become part of the vernacular, then they weren't wrong, merely avant-garde. This war between the creative and obsessive components of my head makes me dizzy, but not nearly so dizzy as when they work together to make me create entirely new calendars.

... anyway....

If you're interested in follow-up, then leave a comment or send an email using the word "jimpe" correctly in a sentence. No, that's not a typo.

From Torque:

What do you consider to be the "best time" of your life so far?

I can't answer this in a single "here is your answer, so I'm going to cheat and provide you with several spans of time out of which I would select certain facets that should be combined in the manner of all proper giant robots into one death-machine of happiness:

My two years at UTAustin were an emotionally formative period, during which I was first really starting to understand that the world was a lot bigger than I thought it was, and that the worlds inside me were a lot bigger than the worlds outside. This is the time period during which I really learned to ask questions, instead of already having answers, and I miss that state of naked seeking.
My ten-month period in Australia, for all that being with one specific individual was abhorrent, was a strangely beautiful thing. It was very much like being in Sweden. Everything there was just slightly off, and that state of things not quite meshing left me pleasantly disoriented during my entire stay. Adding to that is the fact that, for once in my life, I wasn't the one working. I had the days to myself to spend as I wished, and I feel like I got a lot of good creative work done during this period.
Jessie's and my trip to Thailand by way of England was a journey of self-creation and discovery. I got to spend time with someone who was at the time my mistress, in a headspace that I rarely get to explore. I touch on parts of it, but I never quite get into the full experience. We both got to experience that cultural discontinuity together, which made every day a new development, and through it all was the underlying process of rebuilding my body, something that I wish I could experience in even greater degree now.
Finally, the first month of unemployment after HMS was a bizarrely idyllic period. I had Jessie, I had no daily obligation to leave home, I actually had more money than usual thanks to my severance pay and my unemployment checks, and I had every reason to believe that a new job would be right around the corner. It felt like what I imagine retirement must be like.

If you could change one facet of your personality, what would it be?

There exists an unpleasant gap in my head between that which I morally, logically, and ethically believe is what I should be doing; and what I end up doing anyway. I know that the source of my eating problems lies in the fact that it's somewhere between a compulsion and a comfort activity, and yet I continue to indulge it even when doing so makes me feel sick. I know that I have the ability to lose weight; I dropped 110 pounds without stressing myself just by taking the right diet pills and getting the occasional walk, and yet now all my struggles seem to get me nowhere because I sabotage my own best efforts. I have so many stories I could be writing, and yet I spend most of my free time playing City of Heroes. If I could change any one thing, it would be to close the gap between should and shall.

Would you feel comfortable with me being a global dictator?

I'm generally uncomfortable with anyone playing the part of global dictator, but I'll say that I'm far less uncomfortable with the idea of you in the role than I would be with many others in the same position. I could only hope that your reign would end up looking more like the Dave Conspiracy than the Steak Conspiracy.

Would you swap lives with any of your characters willingly?

That's actually a more difficult question to answer than I would care to admit, considering that some of my characters are defined as "me, given some twist of the universe that lets me look like that. If we include the caveat that we're not talking about the realm of eponymous or pseudoeponymous characters, then I can't at this point think of any character whose life I would rather lead than my own. However, I will add that I have a setting in mind involving digital uploads and all-digital sex scenes that might induce me to change my mind.

Would you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

"I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion." —Henry David Thoreau

From Jessie:

Pick the political figure you most wish would spontaneously combust.

Leo Strauss.

Celebrity Deathmatch... James LaBrie of Dream Theater vs. Paul McDermott of Doug Anthony All Stars. Who leaves the cage alive?

Oh, don't make me choose between my babies, you heartless bitch! James castigates Paul for falling and prepares to unleash the full fury of the Host upon him, when Paul suddenly erupes in golden light and convinces James that he's returned to his former glory. James lets down his guard and prepares to launch into the Ultimate Duet, and that's when Paul devours his soul. Their powers thusly fused, Paul then reveals his true form, spreads his wings, opens one of his six mouths, and sings the song that ends the universe.

What do you miss most about Pennsylvania?

The social interaction. As little as we got in Pottstown, we get less in Seattle. Monday Night Dinner might have evolved from a fun evening into an obligation as the attendance shifted away from the crowd with which I was comfortable, but it was still a reason to get out of the house and go somewhere. Then there were the tabletop sessions, the occasional trips to Boston or for the Posts to come down. Seattle doesn't really have the same style of local get-together scene, or if it does I haven't really noticed. Shaterri's been instrumental in organizing the gatherings I've seen, and I've been glad to participate, but I'd love to get something regular happening, even if it's just hooking up once a week to go out to eat with folks.

You've had jobs end due to misunderstandings, politics, and all sorts of reasons. Which one do you most wish you could have kept going at, and why?

ISI. I was on medical leave during a re-org, during which the rest of my team got migrated into Development, which is where I wanted to be in the first place. If I'd been there, I'd have made the same transition and I likely would still be there now. They were big believers in fifty-year careers and long-term vision, and I respected that a lot. Of all the companies for which I've worked, that one felt the most like a cruel twist of fate and the least like a clash of values that made the job unpleasant. I'm willing to bet that, had the timing of the Thailand trip been different, I'd have never had the run-ins with senior management that made my staying there untenable.

You've roleplayed with lots of people. Have you ever wanted to take somebody's character away from them, slap them on the hand, say "you're doing it wrong," and bring the character into your own head so you could do justice to the concept?

Gerald from ASB
Chinook from the Shalek games
Marrita

It's also happened on other occasions, but never quite so strongly as with those.

0001 Lakera 22: Flushed

2007-02-12T22:34:00.000-08:00

The universe giveth with the right hand and taketh away with the left.

Last week was Athamara, the details of are not yet written, but suffice to say that this is the big Lapinian end-of-year holiday celebrating love, friendship, and togetherness. Gift exchange, group gatherings, cuddle piles, lots of expressions of happiness that other people remain as part of our social circles. At least, that's how it's supposed to happen. With nobody having been told about it, it ended up just being a week off of work for me, a nine-day weekend that I really needed.

Today, after plowing through my backlog of email, I discovered the following unfortunate things:

I apparently didn't turn on my out-of-office reminder before leaving work Kimya week. No big deal, in and of itself, except that...
Two days ago, my realtor sent an email telling me that the oil tank at the house had run out! No problem yet but something to address pretty damn fast.

Putting these together, of course, meant that sometime between then and today, we had pipes freeze and burst. The oil delivery truck showed up at the house and immediately called to say that water was running down from the second story through the living room and into the basement. They very helpfully shut off the water main to keep the damage from getting any worse, but I have no way to survey the damage that's already been done.

Now, way back when, I had oil set up on an automatic delivery to prevent this very sort of situation. I just got a bill in my mailbox on a regular basis, and I paid it, and I never worried about getting low because they just knew when to fill the tank, and all was golden. So, when I moved, I assumed the same thing would continue, and that the bills would just show up in my new mailbox since I had mail forwarding.

Some time back in November, I discovered much to my shock that they weren't actually mailing me bills; they were stuffing them in my mailbox. A good chunk of time went missing between the arrival of one bill and the next, and in that window the oil company I had contracted to do automated delivery actually flagged my account as delinquent and disabled the routine shipments. Now, I can't really fault them for this; I'd have done the same if enough time had passed, especially if the house seemed empty and the only contact number I had was disconnected. So, I can't really blame them for this.

I can, however, get right pissed at them for not turning automated delivery back on after I called them in a state of great contrition and paid the delinquent bill in full. I even explained at the time that I had moved and that I wasn't going to be there to check on things. Now, it's entirely possible that they asked me if I wanted to go back to automated delivery and that I said no. I won't deny that that could very well have happened. At this point, I honestly don't remember. If I did, then mea maxima culpa.

Either way, I still have frozen pipes in my house.

I have no way to check the extent of the damage; I'm not there, and I can't really get there in any sort of a reasonable time frame. I just spent a week's vacation and can't really afford to take any more time to go back and look at the house. Even if I could... it wouldn't do me any good. I would just lose more sleep over things. I suppose in that sense, ignorance is bliss. The more facts I have, the more likely I am to chew the walls endlessly, working myself up into a fine froth over something I can't fix.

I've already called the insurance company to file a claim. Having had this scenario already happen three years ago, I have no idea if they'll honor it or not. At best, they say "this is what your policy is for" and it's all good less any deductible. At worst, they say nothing is covered and then I call the mortgage company and tell them they've got a lemon on their hands and I need to talk with their collections department, 'cause if insurance won't cover it, I can't afford to fix it myself and I won't be able to sell it for anything close to what I owe on it.

It would be very nice if the Luck Plane could please stop bouncing me so close to the bowl. Thank you.

Three steps forward, two steps back.

0001 Lakera 11: Requiescat

2007-02-02T22:29:00.000-08:00

Resquiescat In Pacem: Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

In her final column, Molly Ivins said, "we are the people who run this country," and she's right. We are a government of the people, by the people, for the people. It is in our power to decide how this country will be run, and by whom. The politicians may be the ones who make the laws, but we make the politicians. It does not matter how many lobbyists spend their time greasing pockets and palms. It does not matter how much money they spend. What matters is for whom we vote, and why.

They know this. It is we, as a people, who have forgotten.

Right now, we have so many problems facing us as a society that I literally do not know where to begin. Utterly removed from any policy decision, the very process by which people take and keep office, and the abilities that people have once there, are so removed from the sane and rational that we cannot trust our current elected government to ever fix the problems. This is not a complaint about the direction we are headed, though I do have plenty of vitriol to spill on that front. No, this is anger directed at the very process by which we decide who gets to have a say in picking a new direction.

The Supreme Court decision in Buckley v. Valeo has ruled that political contributions equal free speech, meaning that more money equals more speech. This precedent is thirty years old and has almost no chance of revisitation and repudiation given our current political climate. Research abounds to suggest that the amount of money available to a candidate has a direct influence on the likelihood of a candidate getting elected above and beyond any message the candidate carries during the campaign. Until you have billions to spend, your voice will not be heard.

A patchwork of ballot access laws across the country make minor parties an afterthought to our political spectrum. The laws that govern who can get on the ballot in one state may be so different from the laws in the next that it is, I think, not unfair or misleading to characterize the process of registering as a national third-party candidate as "nigh impossible". It has been done, and it can be done, but the opportunity cost of doing so is egregious bordering on absurd.

To add insult to injury, the plurality voting system in place in most of this country's elections means that any third-party candidate that actually gets to on a sufficient number of ballots as to be treated with any modicum of seriousness becomes a threat. These people are not hailed as masters of navigating a rotten system. They are not praised for their dilligence and hard work. They are not recognized as serious contenders for the title of whatever office they seek. No, they are repudiated as spoilers to the party they most closely resemble. A serious Green candidate will become the biggest enemy of the Democrats, a Libertarian the victim of the Republicans, simply out of fear that any attempt at genuine candidacy will steal votes away from the "real" candidate.

What does all of this mean? It means that despite falling interest in the two major parties and rising dissatisfaction with the electoral process in this country, a wealthy elite representing a narrow band of political thought continue to dominate the electoral process. It means that unless you have a seven-figure salary or a major-party endorsement, your election campaign will be at best a fluke and at worst a joke. It means that if you have a viewpoint that deviates too far from the prescribed range of orthodoxy, you have virtually no chance of being elected.

I have not forgotten Bernie Sanders, but I think he's a one-off success story, not a trend.

I don't know where to start fixing things. I don't know if things can be fixed. I have ideas, but they seem huge and I feel very small in comparison. Looking at the laundry list of things that need correction, I still can't shake the sense that the easiest solution is to leave and let somebody else sort out the mess, but here, in no particular order, are my current ideas:

Do vote

This one seems obvious, but I still know people who say that their votes don't count. I can't argue my way out of that, because it's true that any given individual's vote doesn't make a direct difference on the outcome, but the aggregate effect of people not voting is a disaster.

Don't vote for any candidate that rejects public funding

This one may be a dying form of protest, but it's the only form of protest that really comes to mind for this point. The law will not save us here; the only thing we can do is save ourselves. I am prepared to limit my vote choices to those candidates who abide by public campaign limits. Hillary's not getting my vote even if she does win the nomination. I'll write-in if I'm forced into it, but I won't support any candidate that doesn't try to bring some sanity back to campaign financing.

Do look into third-party alternatives

Right now, at this precise moment in time, I care less whether you subscribe to the Libertarian, Green, Reform, Socialist, Workers', Communist, Constitution, or Independent Party. I care that we have a huge range of values and viewpoints that aren't being heard because the financial oligarchy that has been established finds it in its own best interest to keep those choices from being heard. I'll still dun you if you say something stupid, but I'd rather you say it and be heard than say it and be silenced.

Don't give them money

Yes, I am crazy. The last thing we want to do is shoot ourselves in the foot by transfering our political spending from two candidates to three or four. Give of your time, give of your support, but don't give of your pocketbook. If you believe in it, volunteer to help.

Do support organizations working for campaign reform

Here's a quick, but by no means exhaustive, list of groups trying to make the process of picking a winner more fair:

Don't partake of the election hysteria

Right now, just about every campaign that can go negative will do so. We as an electorate need to show that we're not going to buy into it. If a candidate goes negative, take your vote elsewhere and don't be afraid to contact the election office and tell them that their decision to run a negative campaign has cost them a vote.

Do talk to others

This is not a one-person effort. It can't be. It's not a work of dozens or hundreds or even thousands. This won't work if it's not some significant percentage of people who all recognize that this is something that needs to be done, and then actually does it. If you agree, then find someone and tell them. If you don't agree, tell me why. Explain to me what I've overlooked that makes these a bad plan.

Don't give up.

This probably isn't going to make a hill of beans in 2008. It might not even help us by 2010. However, if we don't start taking steps now, we'll never get where we want to go, and maybe if we start working now, by 2012 or 2014 we might start seeing some results.

The longest journey starts with a single step.

0001 Indera 09

2007-01-02T22:24:00.000-08:00

L.C. 0001 Indera 09

By most modern reckoning, this is the "new year". We've passed some arbitrary marker that divides one period of solar revolution from another, and we've tied festivals and celebrations to mark the transition. Ritual is important. It helps us create and preserve meaning. It helps us forge and maintain social connections. It gives us a sense of community and belonging. The rituals that we share help reinforce our feelings of being part of a group, and those emotional ties are what make us a family, a community, a society, and not just a collection of individuals.

However, let us remember that these rituals are themselves arbitrary. The events that spawned any given ritual are not to be trivialized, but of the uncountable events that have occurred since history began, to choose some subset of them and mark them for rememberance above all others is to grant them a meaning and significance that far outstrips their actual import. Worse, to assume that they are somehow universal, even for their widespread adoption, is to display an arrogance that stresses one's own role in the universe as being far beyond its due.

This is not to say that ritual should be trivialized; see my initial points above. However, the rituals and celebrations that we accept should be personal rituals. They should be things which are important to us, and to our friends and family. We should be growing our celebrations and our traditions ourselves. Accept the rituals that your parents gave to you, but understand their sources and decide for yourselves if the reasons you celebrate are your reasons or theirs. There is no reason why your religious holiday should be mine, my celebration of independence should be yours. Our holidays may overlap, and we may mistake commonality of time for commonality of meaning, but even two people who celebrate the same festival may not celebrate for the same reasons.

Did you have a happy Yalda? Or perhaps you celebrate Brumalia in your house instead.

With that in mind, I hope that for everyone who celebrated over the turning of the Gregorian calendar, you had a good time and that you got out of the events more than you put into them. The mark of any successful ritual, in my opinion, is that you come away from it feeling as though the prepration and anticipation felt beforehand were more than worthwhile in the end. If they weren't... perhaps you should consider the reasons and find some new holidays.

I suppose in many ways this post is an ACK. The last few months have been somewhat crazy for me, mostly for reasons that have little to do with anything I've openly discussed here. The short form is that our finances since moving to Seattle have been in what I can only describe as Slow Leak Syndrome. Because the house has not sold yet, I spend a little more on fixed expenses every month than I earn, which means every month I'm sitting on a little more credit card debt than I did the month prior. While I realize that this situation is hardly unfamiliar to the average American household, who at last measure was spending USD100.60 for every USD100.00 earned, this is an awkward and uncomfortable situation for me, since the last time I was in this kind of predicament, I was unemployed and trying to scrape by on the collective rents of my roommates and a paper route that ultimately destroyed my seventh or eighth car. The MPS, if anyone else is keeping score.

Those were not happy times. Living in their shadow again, even for theoretically positive reasons like "I have too much real estate", puts me just a little bit on edge. I'm not in any real danger; I have plenty of cushion on which to fall if I need it, and if push comes to shove I can call my folks and they've already said they'll be more than willing to help out. It's just that every little expense adds up, and instead of eating into the monthly savings, it's adding to the monthly debts.

In fact, the reason why the Ranch hasn't been updated in two months at this point is honestly because I've been having a hard time justifying the kinds of expenditures that would serve as the incentives behind the project, and in the absense of the positive feedback those incentives would provide, I've been letting the whole thing languish. That's not to say that I haven't been at least trying to stick to my goals, but the formula of rewards for good behavior has been hard to execute when the rewards aren't in the budget.

On the whole, I think we've adjusted to living on the Left Coast pretty well. Jessie's in the middle of some new projects. I've been playing a lot of City of Heroes, but at the same time I've been developing what I'd like to consider a fairly rich narrative for the characters involved. Admittedly, it feels a little like downgrading to paint-by-numbers after the freehand of building my own setting and running it every other week, but that game finally took off again after a three-month hiatus for general insanity, and with any luck, tomorrow night will also be as much a success as last week. I've had a number of other projects that I've at least nominally started to keep my creativity flowing, I added a whole page to my novel in the last month, and in general I think the new living arrangements have been conducive to better mindset.

At the very least, I know they've helped Jessie, and that makes my mood much better.

One thing I have finished, or at leastcompleted-to-the-point-of-utility is the Lapinian calendar. The funny date above links to its description. The days of the week and the months of the year were taken from legal words in living languages. As an exercise, why not try to determine the pattern and identify the meanings of the words? These may or may not form the basis later of a Lapinian language, but if they do, then I think these will be a good start.

Right now I'm not sure in what direction Lapinia is growing. It's less than a micronation, more than a fad. It's a culture, a state of mind, a worldview, and an association of people who share it. It's a faction, if anything: a culture and history and symbology all encapsulated in a label. What it becomes is as much a factor of who I become as anything else. Right now, it's an ideal to which I'd like to hold myself, and I think it's an ideal worth sharing with others.

Come sail away with me.

2006-10-22T22:22:00.000-07:00

So, we're back.

Anybody still here probably has by now noticed that the old site is gone, or at least down. That's partially rue. The short answer is... oh, hell, I don't really have a short answer on this one. When I acquired "menagerie.tf" in 1999, AdamsNames was the company tasked with managing the TLD for the French government. Less than a year later, AdamsNames announced that they were going to be giving up the domain back to the French government for whatever reason, but nobody panic, everyone can still manage their domain for free in the meantime. So, at the time it looked like I had a free domain, so I kept it. Then AdamsNames stopped saying they controlled the .tf TLD, announcing that the French government was now holding it and would be making some policy decisions about it "soon". I couldn't make any changes to the domain any more, but by then I was in the house in Pottstown and everything was good.

Then we moved. More on that in a minute, but the important thing is that the old internet access went away, and new internet access happened at the far end. New company, new IP address. So, I went to find out what happened to the .tf TLD, and I found out that in October of 2004, the French government had generously given the TLD to a company called AFNIC, who announced at the time that they had were putting a freeze on the TLD until they could release some new policies surrounding its occupancy and use "in the coming months".

That was two years ago. They're still working on it.

I sent several letters, or perhaps I should say plusiers de lettres to AFNIC's customer service group trying to get the matter resolved, but after the third time they politely told me non, I gave up. So, to those of you who had e-mail addresses on menagerie.tf, I hate to tell you this, but that address is just... gone. I've pretty much exhausted my options for getting it back, and the people who have the power to restore it to me have flatly said that they're not making any changes at all to the domain entries until they get their policies set. After two years, I have no faith that they're going to get to it any time soon. I could be wrong. I would love to be wrong. I'd be perfectly happy being wrong this time.

In the meantime, we've got some new homes.

For now, the new sites look remarkably like the old one. This will change. I have plans. Big plans. Well, "buni big" plans. Big enough. I'll get to 'em "soon".

We're in Seattle now.

The cross-country drive was an experience I'll not soon forget. I hope I never do, of course, but the vagarities of time and memory ensure that at least some things will fade as the weeks stretch into months and years. A friend of mine once said that memories faded to make room for new ones. Or maybe I just think he said that. It sounds like something he would say, at any rate. Apologies if somebody else did say it and I misattributed it. No apologies if nobody said it and I just gave it away to someone else. I don't need any more profundity for now.

I don't know at this point what I could say about the trip that would really make sense to anyone who hadn't been there. The factual events of the drive itself has been recorded in some detail. The emotional experiences that the trip engendered could not really be communicated without an attempt to recreate the experience, or perhaps access to a cerebrochord and some decent authoring software. I'm not the virtuoso I pretended to be, but I'm willing to learn. All I can say is that in many ways the trip itself and the surrounding events pushed me very far outside my normal comfort zone, and I got to experience a lot of emotional extremes as a result that I might not have had the chance to feel otherwise.

I'm glad in one way that it all happened, but I hope that certain aspects of it never have to happen again.

The rest of the move... is best left forgotten, really. Bad things happened. Emotions flared. Voices and tempers were raised. We spent an extra five or six days in various hotels. In the end, our belongings arrived, and we're fairly certain nothing broke during the move that we weren't sort of expecting to lose. A few dishes and a few bottles of liquid didn't survive, staining a few other boxes an interesting off-red color and leaving glass fragments in our cookware, but nothing broke that we couldn't replace. The important things survived reasonably intact. At this point, I'm honestly thinking it's best if we forget it all. Let the ravages of history claim these dark times, and leave me the happier for their passing.

Seattle is beautiful. I really don't have any better way to put it. Seattle is beautiful. I think, for once, something has lived up to my internal hype.

Two days this week, I biked to work. I didn't Wednesday or Thursday because it was raining and I don't yet have decent gear for riding in active rain, and this morning I was running late because I was sore from the three-mile walk last night to and from the QFC for supplies. Costco's a twenty-minute drive away if we need supplies in bulk, but more often than not I feel better about waiting until the weekend, driving into Seattle proper to go to Pike Place Market and buying local fresh produce from one of the vendor stalls there. The market also has a couple of butchers, a dairy, an Asian market, two or three bakeries, and four coffee shops, of which one is Starbucks #1 if I feel like venerating at the shrine. While I'm there I can grab a coffee and watch the trawlers and boats on the sound and gaze into the fog. There's a family-owned teriyaki place on practically every street corner, and there's a small java shack selling coffee out of a plywood box every five-hundred feet.

The Seattle skyline has trees in it. Actual green trees, visible in the skyline.

Passing through Snoqualmie Pass on our way here initially felt like coming home. It wasn't just the end of a long trip. It was a return to something. My words fail me here, for I really have no expression for it. I once quoted Robin in saying, "you can just visit, but I plan to stay". That's really how it felt, the emotion of discovering a longing for something one has never seen before. This place has felt inviting to me in a way that Texas never did, that Pennsylvania only managed in some rare situations. Jessie and I knew that Pottstown was never a permanent solution, though we thought it would last longer than it did. I don't think either of us regret it being so short, though.

If anything, we're just hoping the house sells quickly, so that we can buy a new one here. Not another short-term one, though. This time... this time I think it's to stay.

Welcome home.

As an aside, some of you have probably noticed that the ranch hasn't seen an update in two months. I had planned on resuming my tracking in October, but the stress of relocation and then the insanity that followed more or less made that a fool's plan. Now with October mostly gone, it'd be rather pointless to start tracking just yet. Come November 1, I'll be back on track. I have some big ideas for how to revamp the site, too, to broaden its appeal.

Fake it 'til you make it.

2006-09-15T01:45:00.000-07:00

Where does time go?
Are there seconds caught in the stitching of my pocket?
Could I pull a minute out of the lint trap of my dryer, looking for that missing sock?
Did I lose an hour under the couch as I sat with you, running my fingers through your hair?
Where does time go?
Last year I was giggling, wide-eyed at the sides of my crib, wondering at the miracle of my own fingers and toes.
Last month I was crying, sitting on the sidewalk, wondering if anyone would ever like me.
Last week I was cringing, daring to reach out into the digital world, looking for others who might feel as I did.
Yesterday I was smiling, watching you step off the bus, waving as you slung a duffel bag over your shoulder.
Where does time go?
Tomorrow we'll be in Seattle, watching the sun rise over Puget Sound.
Next week we'll be in Canada or Iceland or Finland or Thailand, looking up at the sky and wondering what's next.
Next month we'll be in space, staring down at that dirty brown and blue marble, wondering how we ever lived there.
Next year we'll be in bed, gazing into each other's eyes and waiting for the sunset.

Ever since my last post, things have been... insane. There is no better word for it. So, rather than rehash absolutely everything, let me see if I can provide it all in some kind of quick summary, the last month in thirty seconds as performed by... uh... oh, never mind:

I got the job in Seattle.
The HR department promised me relocation based on the EDC's closure.
Management panicked because they hadn't yet designed or budgeted the EDC closure relocation package.
They came back with a signing bonus instead, which I accepted.
I put my house on the market.
My primary CoH character hit the highest level in the game, also known as "dinging fifty".
A friend in CoH and I, with the help of some game logs and a few other people, cranked out a good amount of text on said character's condition.
Jessie and I have started the process of applying for an apartment in Bothell twenty minutes away from my new office.
The moving company arrives a week from either tomorrow or day after to pick up our stuff and take it to the Left Coast.
We're planning a five-day roadtrip to get from Pottstown to Bothell. I'm taking a week's vacation with my new manager's approval.
Today's my last day in my current position.

I think that's pretty much everything. I could say "nothing else is new," but it would sound trite. Right now, everything is new. I've never sold a house before. I've only ever moved my own stuff once before like this, and I wasn't any better prepared then than I am now. I've never tried to arrange an apartment on such short notice or at such great distance; the last time we moved into an apartment, it was occupied already and we were just adding our tenancy to his, then renting another unit in the same complex. I've been twice to the Seattle area, and I know what some of the parts of it look like, but I've never had the chance for an extended stay, and really I only know what I've read in the picture books and what people tell me. This really is jumping off the high dive and hoping that the water will cushion the fall.

It's scary, and exhilarating, and nervewracking, and wonderful. If Jessie weren't with me, I'd go mad from panic. As it is, I'm only just holding it together, but it's still a beautiful thing.

Hopefully Mike will be up this weekend to help us clean up and pack. Next Monday night will probably be our last big group meal with the local contingent of folks in the area we know: Bennie, Sue, Gideon, Kitana and that crowd. The movers show up either the twenty-third or twenty-fourth to take our boxes to Bothell, hopefully to our new apartment or to a storage facility. Some time next week, Kincaid comes down for a visit to help finish the assembly of our stuff into neat boxes. Sunday week, we start the drive to Seattle. Monday, October second, I start my new job full-time in my new office. Analyst III, Enterprise Monitoring.

I feel like I've just turned my entire life umop-apisdn. I wonder if this is what twenty kilos of TNT feels like when it detonates. It's less sexhurt than a third nostril opening but definitely more gutwrenching than having my life erased or discovering it never existed.

Last day, Year of the City, 2274. Carousel begins. Identify.

As a side note to all of this, the Ranch on Mars isn't dead. I didn't update it last month with new goals because I knew in the crush of everything that's happening, I would fail, and that would be three months in a row that I had planned something and then missed it, and I thought that the smart thing to do would be to simply not put myself into an emotional bind. I'm still totally committed to the project, and starting when I get to Bothell I'll be updating it regularly, as well as expanding on the site, I hope. I have some ideas involving expanding things and changing how I document my progress. Right now I'm changing six or seven pages, and that's kind of ridiculous. I know how I want to streamline the design, but until after we're in Washington, I know I won't have time to do the work, or to concentrate on pushing myself on anything other than moving.

No more talking; time to land.

2006-08-10T01:41:00.000-07:00

I think I've just surfed the Luck Plane.

The day after I arrived in Seattle, my manager called me and asked me if I would have time later to talk, and that it was very important. Now, anyone who knows me should know what that kind of statement can do to my heart rate and general feeling of well-being. So, as calmly as I could, I asked him if it were anything bad. He said, "no, not really", but he refused to elaborate further and simply said he'd call me at 14h00 his time and that I should plan to be somewhere private for the call.

The hour that passed after that was pretty much a big bright blur, as I tried to figure out what he could possibly want to tell me that he didn't want to tell my other teammate who was present, and that he couldn't tell me on the first call. I joked with Trell about it being my notice that I was being encouraged to seek other opportunities, but it was in the context of "ha ha only serious".

At the designated hour, my manager called me, and I dutifully sequestered myself by the stairs away from my team, and he informed me that in approximately one hour, the rest of the people at the Eastern Distribution Center in Bensalem, the facility at which I'd been working for the last seventeen months, would be shut down on or by 2006-03-30. The entire
operation was being relocated to Louisville, Kentucky, and outsourced to a firm specializing in logistics and distribution. T-Mobile already had an arrangement like that with another firm, ATCLE, located in Fort Worth, and so this wasn't really a shock for the company, though it was probably surprising for everyone working at the facility.

Actually, it probably can't have been too much of a shock, really. To get into August and not have a lease signed for the following year haed to tell a few people that something wasn't on the level. We still had sprinkler system issues and an ongoing battle with the landlord over who was paying for what. I don't think anyone really got caught too much by surprise by this, though I'm sure a lot of people were disappointed that it turned out this way. Shortly after the public announcement, the general manager of the facility sent everyone home for the day.

At any rate, this announcement took everything that had come before it and threw it all into overdrive. My manager and I had agreed in the past that I really had no promotion path in my current team. The group simply wasn't big enough to support two people at the Team Lead level, and I was as close to that as I could get without being one, and the current team lead wasn't going anywhere any time soon. Add to that that I was on-site and not in a corporate center, to get into another team, I would have to move anyway, so I had already geared myself up for the eventuality that Jessie and I would probably be moving to Seattle some time in... oh, say, 2008 or so.

The announcement that they were closing the EDC meant that I had seven months to find another position in the company or risk being relocated to Atlanta. Nothing against Atlanta, but... I don't think the culture would have been good for either Jessie or I, to say nothing of the weather.

Now, when I initially applied for the position in Enterprise Monitoring, I didn't know that the EDC was closing. I found out after I got to Seattle that this was going to happen. So, suddenly, I had a lot of pressure on myself to do really well at this interview. Before I left, the HR rep with whom I'd spoken had suggested that I could interview on week one and have an answer by week two, and suddenly that sounded like a really good idea. If I was going to get the job, I wanted the peace of mind as soon as I could have it. If I wasn't, I needed to know so I could start looking for alternatives.

I got the job pretty much as soon as I walked in the door.

To be fair, it didn't go quite that quickly. I showed up on-site for the interview, waited for about ten minutes for the hiring manager to come downstairs, and then chatted with him as we returned to his cube. I then had to confirm that I wasn't just fishing for a means out of the EDC and that I had in fact applied for the position before I knew that the EDC was closing. That established, he said that he was very excited to know that I was interested and that he was hoping to be able to convince me to follow through on my expression of interest. We talked a bit about my background, he showed me some of the tools of the trade, he introduced me to some of the people with whom I'd be working if I took the job, and then he sat me back down at his desk and said, "Can I be honest with you? I want to give you an offer letter".

The whole interview took maybe half an hour, and most of that was meeting people.

Now, this is by no means a "done deal" yet. He has to get signoff from my current manager, then he has to go through a complicated process of dumping numbers and information into a spreadsheet that the company providdes to make it easy to determine compensation offers, which will ultimately spit out a single number at him which he will then ignore. He's then got to get me an offer letter and suggest an amount, which may or may not be sufficient to justify relocating to Seattle. It could, in theory, still fall apart at any point up to me signing off on the offer.

I figure the only way I'm not going to sign is if he tells me I have to take a pay cut to move. I don't think that'll be an issue.

He also asked me about timeframes, and I told him that I had a house to sell. He said he understood that, but still wanted to put in for "as soon as possible". My current manager asked me to give him two weeks, but outside of that he said he was fine with whatever timetable I could set. I really can't do anything until I get back to Philadelphia, so that means at least a week-and-a-half from now before I do anything at all.

So... what does all this mean? It means that very likely, in the next few weeks, Jessie and I"at least"will probably be moving to the Seattle area. The job is in Bothell, so we'll look for houses in the area, though we'll probably start with a six-month lease on an apartment and go from there.

Now, why does this count as surfing the Luck Plane? Simply put, timing. You see, originally when I was looking at moving to the area, I told people that I was willing to pay for my own relocation, and I was and am, but I wasn't looking forward to it. It's an expensive proposition. However, because of the closing of the facility, upper management offered, or at least I think they offered, to pay the relocation costs of people who took other positions in the company as part of the employee retention program. This means that, if I wheedle and beg and sweet-talk enough folks, I may get to move on the company dime. The Suits really are pickin' up the bill, or so goes the theory. I won't know for sure until I get back to Philly and ask on Tuesday of the Employee Assistance Program folks that should be on-site to help people transition through this difficult period of readjustment.

Oh, this is going to be so difficult for me. Toolset development. A UNIX desktop at work. A private cubicle. Sure, that last may sound like I'm setting my sights too low, but share an office with my current coworker for a week and you'll understand why this makes me happy.

You can just visit, but I plan to stay.

2006-07-31T01:36:00.000-07:00

Last month—at the end of May, really—I started a new project, the Ranch on Mars. The idea was to harness some of the tricks of psychology that I've seen exploited at work to try to make meaningful improvements in my own life. With the first month of tracking progress behind me, I think it's a good time to evaluate not only my progress, but the means of measuring them. I learned a few things about my own brain, which I can hardly say is a bad thing.

First, the good news. I was able to successfully complete two of my four goals for the month, and in both cases by better than an expected margin. With the regular introduction of money into my various savings accounts, I saw a good increase in our financial cushion in case of disaster. A two-hundred dollar deposit into my stock account combined with the dividends of the last quarter to make enough of a cash sum on hand to make a stock purchase that would keep my commission rate under three percent, which is pretty good. Two percent or less would be optimal, but that's going to take larger sums than I can currently drop. Getting to work early means that, at least in theory, I get out of work early. This has helped me spend less time on the road because now I'm no longer stuck in rush hour traffic as often or as long. That's definitely had a positive impact on my quality of life, especially with summer heat. On the whole, I think I did really well on the goals that I completed.

Now, the downside. My weight actually went up month-to-month, and I made absolutely no headway at all on my novel this month. These are both disappointing, but I'm trying not to be too bummed about them. It means I didn't earn the DSLite I'd been wanting, but oddly I don't feel that I'm denying myself something or living the ascetic's life. Did it mean I didn't want one badly enough? I don't think so. The weight difference in my purse alone will be an improvement, and I admit some amount of wanting the cool toy that my wife has. So, what happened to keep me from achieving these when the other two came so easily?

As far as the writing goes, I really do think that City of Heroes takes a large part of the blame for this. It's very easy to simply come home and slump in a chair and zone out in front of a game, doubly so when one has had a really shitty day at work, and I've had a lot of shitty days this last month. My team lead was out of pocket a good part of the month because of personal issues—a death in the family on top of scheduled vacation—and so I've had to step up unexpectedly and serve as head of projects that I had expected someone else to be managing. This has meant that, despite getting into the office at 08h00 or even 07h45 on some mornings, I didn't get to leave work until 17h00 or later. In one case, I was still at work as late as 19h30. This had a huge negative impact on my desire to do anything other than lump when I got home in the evenings, and City of Heroes is just interactive enough to make me feel like I'm being at least mildly creative even if all I'm doing is spinning my gears.

This isn't to say I did nothing creative last month. I've been working on what could really best be classified as "fan fiction", even though the characters are my own creation. They just happen to be set in the City of Heroes setting, and thus are utterly non-publishable unless I feel like going back and ripping large chunks of history apart. They're also mostly collaborations, which mean that I don't have sole ownership of any of the works. It's creativity, but it's not progress on my novel, which is what I really hoped to achieve. Still, it's been good to at least keep writing, even if it's not writing that furthers my goal of being published.

Finally on the creative front, Jessie made an observation that I think bears further exploration. I do most of my creative writing when I'm not at home. I'd never noticed this before, but I think she's onto something here. In the past, most of my short works happened when I was in the computer lab on campus. The biggest chunks of Child of Man appeared when I was on trips of one sort or another. I added half a chapter and four-thousand words across previous parts over Anthrocon. I had actually set the goal of finishing chapter twelve anticipating a trip to Seattle last month, and then the trip was delayed. This actually did throw my plans for creative writing for a bit of a loop. The trip's been rescheduled for next month, which should give me some time to actually work on my novel in peace, but it will also give me the chance to get some other bits of writing done that I've been delaying. This also makes me wonder, though, if it wouldn't be beneficial to plan to take regular evenings out to a coffee shop or some other home-away-from-home with my laptop to give myself the chance to work on stories. Maybe even a weekend trip out to a motel somewhere on the interstate just to write might benefit me.

As far as the weight goes, there are so many things I could blame here that it would sound not like a reasoned discussion but instead a laundry list of excuses. This said, however, I think I know what the largest factor of my failure here was. There is no direct correlation between what I eat and what I weigh. Now, that sounds like an absolute load of bulldada, and it is, but within it lies the key to the answer. Consider the following scenario:

Day one, morning: I weigh myself and my weight is X.
Day one, afternoon, I eat something unhealthy.
Day two, morning, I weigh myself and my weight is X-n.
Day two, all day, I eat reasonably and moderately.
Day three, morning, I weigh myself and my weight is X again.

This happens more often than I think anyone really realizes, and it's not exactly rocket science. Many things have an impact on day-to-day weight, not the least of which is how much fluid I've had to drink. A gallon as compared to a half-gallon of diet tea at work could easily make up the difference in those numbers. So could sweating out a lot of water, or a second bowl of curry, or skipping the toast in favor of the bagel. Whatever. The point is not the specifics, but rather the psychological impact of these events. Eating something bad didn't hurt me, because my weight dropped. Eating well didn't help me, because my weight rose. This sends all kinds of mixed signals that reinforce bad behaviors and punish good ones, and that's a surefire way to undermine positive performance.

So, what's the solution? The scale is the only measuring tool I have, and its accuracy as a measuring device is suspect. Then again... is it the only tool? I do have another means of measuring weight impact: intake. Specifically, calorie load. Does this mean I'm going to be counting calories? In a word, yes. Why? Because it's more reliable than the scale. The scale makes a good trailing indicator. Does the moving average say I'm going down in weight? Then I'm eating right. Does it say I'm going up? Then I need to re-evaluate what I'm eating. The food, though, is a pretty good leading indicator. If I eat that ice cream bar, I'm going to need fat jeans. If I skip that second bowl of rice, I may fit into the top I've owned for six months that I can't wear without feeling ugly despite the pretty color.

This next month is going to suck. However, hopefully it will pay off in the long run.

As a side note, I'm not blind to the effects of exercise on weight and health, but after my trike got stolen, I took a real hit in morale. Getting out and walking, especially in the summer, is just no fun. The trike was fun, and that got removed through no fault of my own other than perhaps not keeping it under a laser cage. I had two DDR pads, one mine and one Kitana's on extended loan, but one got broken at Anthrocon and the other is so close to falling apart that it's not really reliable any more, and bad feedback is more frustrating than no feedback at all. I've rearranged the furniture in the living room to provide space for a replacement pad once I buy it, but I do have to buy it first. Jessie and I have talked about getting exercise bikes to ride together, but we'd have to find a good place to put them. I could walk around the warehouse during the day, but that's hotter than doing it outside, and the overhead fans just stir up the hot air and make breathing a privilege instead of a right.

So, in recap:

I didn't achieve my goals in July by a large enough margin to justify buying the DSLite for myself.
I have a pretty good idea why I didn't achieve the two I missed.
I have my goals for August based on what I learned in July.

I still feel a bit like a perfect damn fool putting myself through this, but at the same time, I think it's helped me, even if just a little bit. I saved two hundred dollars I wouldn't have otherwise. I'm getting to work at 08h00 without a struggle, and I'm setting my sights on 07h45 and thinking "Hey, I can maybe even push myself back to 07h00 one day!" I'm feeling more focused on my weight issues than I ever have during the whole time I was on Atkins/low-carb/whatever. I don't feel like my novel is some far-off one-day thing any more. I'm making progress, a step at a time.

A true initiation never ends.

In other news, as hinted above, I'm going to be going on a business trip next week. Seattle—Bellevue, specifically—this time, for two weeks. I leave Monday morning, and I return Friday a week later. That's eleven days in the PacNorWest. Anyone reading this who'll be around during that time, please let me know. I'd love the chance to find out who my potential neighbors are.

That's right. Potential neighbors. My stated purpose for the trip to Seattle is training at the hands of somebody who has a decade of experience in our primary software package, but I do have an ulterior motive for going. Last week, I applied for a position in the Enterprise Monitoring group in the Bothell office. My manager knows and supports the transition, as does the person with whom I'll be training. Everyone that I've told so far has been positive about it. Now I can but hope that the hiring manager is as supportive.

This wasn't the way this was supposed to happen. I really hadn't planned on looking for work in Seattle until 2008 or so. I'd figured I'd get one of my two mortgages paid in full, rack up some living capital under my belt, apply for a position, and make a nice leisurly transition from one coast to the other. I had a few years yet in Pottstown to get some sense of stability in my life. I really did think that this is how things woul dhappen, and I planned accordingly.

Then I came in contact with the event horizon of the Luck Plane.

As fate would have it, a friend of mine is looking for work. Knowing he has a degree in psychology, I suggested he apply for one of the many open manager positions at the distribution center. He asked me for a requisition number—the unique ID given to the position itself so that applications can be tracked more easily—and when I went into the company jobs website, I happened to notice an open position for my same analyst grade in a team that does work interesting to me in a location to which I've said I wanted to go. So, after a quick consultation with Jessie, I put in an application. I didn't really go looking for this opening so much as I found it, as one might find a dollar bill on the sidewalk, or a cake.

On Friday, my manager presented me with the name of the recruiter for the position, and that afternoon I called her. When I told her that I had applied, and that I'd be in Seattle for training in a week, she said that it would probably be a great chance for me to interview, and that if things went really well, I could have an answer on whether or not I got the job before I left for Pottstown again. On the whole, she sounded really positive, though she did warn me that T-Mobile doesn't pay to relocate people in the COS team. That means I'd have to pay for my own move, but I told her that I was fine with that. She wished me luck in my application process and said she'd see what she could do to escalate the timetable for my interview so that I could plan on taking care of that while I was already there.

I'm in what feels a bit like uncharted territory here. The plans I had made are now potentially in total disarray. I've never tried to sell a house before. I've moved cross-country, but I had a place I knew I was staying when I arrived. I don't know what kind of timetables exist or are proper to request to get all of these details resolved. I haven't even gotten the job and I'm worrying about what to do if I get it. I've had serioua stomach-twitches all weekend over it.

On the other hand, of course, is the fact that even if this had waited until 2008, I probably would still be going through all of these sensations. Doubtless I would not have gone looking for answers until I needed them, and even now I may not. If I don't get the job, nothing has changed. If I do get it, it's something I've said I wanted, and I really do think the move is for the best. Pennsylvania is nice, but the weather here is still horribly unpleasant during the summer, as our current hundred-degree heatwave will demonstrate. The neighborhood in general is not a good area in which to live. The culture in Seattle, so I have heard, is far more like what I think Jessie and I are seeking as far as standing community. If nothing else, the job opportunities within T-Mobile are better at the corporate headquarters than they could ever hope to be at the warehouse. I want very much to believe this is a move in the right direction.

Do I sound like I'm trying to convince myself? I am, sort of. When I felt like I had no chance to get out of my current situation, I've said repeatedly that I wanted to get into a corporate environment again. Now that I'm facing the chance to get it, I'm suddenly unsure. I don't think this is a change in what I want, or in what I think I want, as much as it's a case of cold feet. I'm no longer standing on the side of the pool, looking up at the high dive and saying I wish I could do a back flip. I'm now standing on the diving board looking down at the water and realizing what a long drop it really is. If I climb back down, I'll still want it just as much, and I'll have added to it the "shame" of having run from it, but that doesn't make it any less nervewracking.

Still, for now the best approach is Zen. The interview hasn't happened yet. The interview may not happen this trip. I may not know anything soon. Until it happens, guessing about the future is needless anxiety. Relax and enjoy.

Tomorrow does not exist. Twenty tomorrows is a long time.

2006-07-04T01:33:00.000-07:00

Some time between Saturday afternoon when I showed off my recumbent trike to Chris and Jaded, and last night when my housemate Erin took the trash to the back of the garage, some clever wag or wags came into my back yard with a couple of implements, tried to break the high-impact plastic of my Kryptonite coated-braid chain lock, successfully cut through the plastic and steel of the chain itself, opened the gate from the inside, and stole my new Sun EZ-3 USX.

I called Bikesport, the shop from which I had acquired it, and they confirmed a purchase date of June 7. I'd had it less than a month.

As much as a part of my brain is tempted at this point to start saying "him name is Eezy-Three Trike ps who took my trike I'll find my trike", I'm really not in the mood for levity. My home, or at least some part of it, has been violated. My property has been taken. My hutch has somebody else's smell in it.

This was neither a random incident nor an accident. The trike wasn't visible from the street. People have seen me riding it around the neighborhood and a few did ask me how much it cost, so some folks had to know it was worth something. Whoever came into the yard stopped with the trike; they didn't try to get into the house. Somebody knew where it was and where to look for it. That probably means whoever took it lives locally.

I'm angry. I'm angry at a lot of things. I'm angry at the people who thought this was acceptable behavior in any context. I'm angry at those people's parents for not having taught them better. I'm angry at myself for buying a twenty-dollar lock to secure a thousand-dollar vehicle. I'm angry at the borough for being the kind of place in which I had to have a lock on my trike in my own back yard.

I've already called the police and filed an incident report, and I've called the insurance company and filed a claim on my homeowners' insurance. Today's a holiday and I'm not going anywhere if I can avoid it but tomorrow I can get a copy of my receipt to attach to both reports. With any luck, not only will the police locate the old one but the insurance company will reimburse me for the loss and I'll end up with two. Then I can get one sized for Jessie and we can go riding together.

What gets to me about this whole affair is that whoever took it is quickly going to discover that it's not sized to be ridden by anyone under my height; their legs won't reach the pedals. They're not going to be able to get any personal use out of it. In all likelihood, somebody who knew it was worth something stole it to sell it, but how likely is it that someone could sell that and not have it be noticed?

I don't think anyone took my trike to have it. I don't even think someone took it to sell it. I think someone took it to keep me from having it. Yes, I know that sounds paranoid, but given the petty vandalism that's already happened against the house and the cars of the people who've lived here, I wouldn't put it past some of the kids around here to do that.

This is exactly the sort of behavior that really makes me doubt folks who tell me that human beings are inherently good-natured. It's also the sort of thing that suggests to me that maybe it's time to look at moving closer to my job and writing off Pottstown and the surrounding area.

I've also adjusted my goals for the month of August; I don't think I'll have my trike back by then.

Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover.

2006-06-29T01:30:00.000-07:00

First, thanks to Balinares for poking me. It's been a long time since I've put anything in here, and while I can understand going a few days or even a few weeks between updates, this is bordering on the absurd. One might think that I'd be a little more cognizant of the fact that people can't read what hasn't been written, but that among other things is part of my problem.

First off, Anthrocon. Nothing much to say there, really. By now, anything I could say about the experience in general has been handled by someone else, so I'll narrow it down to my own area. The writing track this year boasted more panels than we had in any year previous, and next year we hope to ~~take over the whole pocket program~~ expand again. Instead of generic writing panel, my goal is to break things down into a larger number of narrowly-defined areas of interest. "How to write porn", "how to write character descriptions", and "how to write dialogue" are some of the proposed topics, and I believe I already have panelists ready to handle these. The annual Eye of Argon reading went off with only a few headsplosions, and the Iron Author submissions were as painful as ever. Kudos to the one who wrote a quarter of his dialogue in barks, yaps, yips and growls. More pain for next year.

Now, outside Anthrocon... why so silent? That's a hard question to answer. Truth is, I don't have a good reason. I've said it before, though, and it seems to bear repetition: I get too busy living life to talk about it. I've noticed that my post rate goes up when extraordinary events happen, but very little of late has seemed unusual, either good or bad. I have off days. I have on days. On the whole, my life goes well. I love my wife, I enjoy my housemates, I don't hate my job, I spend time with my friends. I feel a bit like the "average white suburbanite slob" from Denis Leary's famous song.

The person depicted in that song, incidentally, is exactly the wrong kind of person for me. In fact, that song stands for pretty much everything I think is wrong with America. That level of smug self-assurance and willingness to deliberately provoke schadenfreude drives me batshit insane when other people do it. It's what I like to call "internet-β" behavior. This is not to be confused with Universe β, though the two are related.

Back on the subject"one of many subjects"I've become somewhat complacent. I've paid off my debts. My mortgage is on autopay. My job isn't under any real risk, and at this point I feel like I've picked up enough skills that even if it does, I can pick up a new one reasonably easily. Really, I'm living a large part of my life on autopilot these days, simply because I've progressed to the point that I can. That's a heck of an achievement, in one fashion. I don't have to micromanage my day-to-day existence just to get by. I don't have to worry about how I'm going to pay for my next meal, my next mortgage payment, my next vacation. I'm one platform higher on the spiral staircase, worrying about whether to buy this new game or that one, whether I go to Further Confusion or save up for MegaPlex. I can choose whether to put money into savings accounts or the stock market. For lack of a better term, I'm set.

Therein lies the problem. I feel in some tiny way like I've stopped growing. I've stopped advancing. I've stopped moving towards other long-term goals, goals of getting out of the daily grind, of having a figure that I wouldn't mind showing off, or being able to extend my umbrella over others. I'm good, but in achieving good I've stopped looking for great.

So, it's time to do something.

If this seems like a cheap gimmick... it is. Strangely, what I'm finding at least at work is that it works. Small goals, over time, build up into larger projects. Short-term tasks linked to obvious and immediate gratification lead to a renewed dedication to complete those tasks. The bonus program at T-Mobile is structured around this idea, and as Pavlovian as it feels at times, I recognize its efficacy at least on my brain. I find myself saying, "I should get this done so I'll earn my bonus" and not hating it, because there's a direct link between an action and a reward. There's a stick, to be sure. Not participating in the "bonus program" can lead to performance warnings, but the way it's phrased as a carrot, enticing people with rewards, tricks the human brain into positive feedback.

Thus, I'm going to see if applying this to my own projects will help me complete them. This month—that is, the month of July—I have five goals: weight, increased time on my new trike, early arrival at work, complete another chapter of my novel, and add some extra money to my savings accounts. If I can achieve all of those, I'll buy myself a new DSLite. If I can't, I don't. I don't need one. I have a perfectly functional DS. I want one, and that's what makes this trick effective. I'm not denying myself something I need, but I'm indulging myself in a minor "goodie" and directly tying its acquisition to performance-based goals. I'll see if this makes me feel like I'm doing myself a mental disservice or if I come through it feeling like I did a good thing.

Branching to Iwego for a moment, I took the name for the project—Ranch on Mars—from a song by the Galactic Cowboys, a band that I happened to hear once in concert opening for Dream Theater in high school. Enamored of both groups, I bought their albums, and fell utterly in love with the latter while only being passingly interested in the former. However, there was this one track on Space In Your Face called Ranch On Mars. A quick scan of the lyrics should pretty much explain why they hit me the way they do, but more to the point, the music has on more than one occasion moved me to tears, which is pretty freaky for what's essentially a punk-style song. While most of the music is pretty jarring, everything falls into this incredible harmonic line during the chorus and it feels... uplifting. Empowering. Impassioned. Longing. It's not just a wishful thought; it's a call to action.

So, finally, after fourteen years and thousands of iterations, here I am trying to make something happen. It's not enough to say, "I want to be thin". What am I doing to make myself thinner? It's not enough to say "I want to be published". What am I writing and to whom am I sending it? It's not enough to say "I want to be healthy". How much exercise am I actually getting? It's time to stop saying "I want" and start saying "I do". Want implies the expectation that someone else will fill that want.

I know, I know. This is more bootstrap levitation rhetoric, and it deserves little more than deconstruction and mockery. To this I say, "not quite". Notice what my goals are: ten pounds, one chapter of a novel, three hours of riding a week, one hundred dollars, and shaving half an hour off of my start time every day. These aren't exactly huge things from a grand scope, and I still may not get all of them. There are a lot of old saws about eating whales in small bites and moving mountains one rock at a time, and that's what I'm trying to capture here. I'm trying to get that same sort of steady-progress-towards-small-goals feel here. If I can do ten pounds in a month, I'll maybe aim for twelve next month. If I can't, I'll look at what I did accomplish and scale up appropriately. The point is to set each goal within reach, recognize what the genuine limits are, and keep myself at or near the edge of what's reasonable. The idea here isn't to dedicate myself to move mountains every day. The idea is to figure out which rocks I can lift, lift them and use that to get a bit stronger and lift a few more, then build over time until I'm lifting fairly large boulders, but also moving mountains over time.

Don't wish me luck. Luck won't help. Wish me dedication. Wish me determination. Wish me focus.

Someday we'll live among the stars.

2006-05-05T01:24:00.000-07:00

It's been far too long since I've updated this, as usual, but this time I think I have a reasonably good excuse: I've had a lot on my mind, and I wanted to make sure I said it in as well-reasoned and carefully-considered a manner as possible. There's been a lot of discussion-provoking thought of late, and I wanted to take the time I needed to mentally masticate it into something reasonable, rather than follow my gut response and post the first thing that came to mind. As I've said before, I'm a writer, not an orator. My first inclination is usually to make a great bloody mess of everything because I'm posting from the hindbrain and the fingertips, not the cerebrum and the mental digestion center. My first drafts of things such as this are usually very visceral, and unpleasant even for the author to review later.

Some time back, an infamous video of the excesses at gay pride marches made the rounds. This got a number of people very distinctly put out and they all wanted to share this link with the world, each saying in some fashion, "go look at this for yourself" adding no additional content. Now, this internet-Crying-Game trick really doesn't impress me, and when three of my friends all post within minutes of each other, each suggesting I look at the same thing and none offering a single word of commentary, I pretty much wrote off the whole thing as very likely some gimmick. Ultimately, however, I was dragged into the fray and I watched, but I had the sound off on my computer at the time, so I sat through several minutes of scenes from pride parades with absolutely no commentary whatsoever. No voice-over, no slurs, no nothing. Just scenes of people trying to be pretty, people trying to be flashy, people making public home movies, that sort of thing. I saw nothing in the footage at which I took offence, and promptly wrote the whole thing off as a "whatever".

Let me repeat one important part of that paragraph, because it will come up later: I saw nothing at which I took offence in the gay pride march video. Public sex doesn't bother me. Drag doesn't bother me. Leatherboys don't bother me. Cops in uniform marching in pride parades annoy me, but only insofar as cops in uniform—or indeed, people in most traditional uniforms—annoy me, and I suspect most of that is a mental shorthand for people assuming that the uniform and by extention the role in society that wearing the uniform connotes makes them somehow more deserving of preferential treatment and exemptions from the social mores governing bad behavior. I don't get the same response for flight attendants or astronauts than I do for military types and police. Nor do I get it for doctors. I do get it for business suits, though. In fact, upon further reflection, I think this particular response is limited to uniforms and jobs that people assume grants them some kind of social privilege.

That, however, is an entire essay unto itself, perhaps one I will inflict upon the public after I have had time to digest it more fully. For now, my concern remains the video and how it relates to my sense of cultural alienation.

After my initial soundless screening, in which I found the whole thing to be relatively boring, I discovered quite by accident that there was in fact a voiceover to the images. So, I went to try to load the video again after fiddling with my sound, and within five minutes I had closed the browser tab in which YouTube had started spewing its noxious contents and gone on to other things. The words being read off-camera for the benefit of the audience were more annoying and, dare I say "offensive", than the contents of the video itself. I didn't bother sitting through the whole thing, because to me it became apparent within the first few minutes where the speaker was trying to lead with his arguments, and by this point I had seen the explosions in everyone's blogs over it and I didn't feel like listening to the whole speech. If anyone thinks I missed anything really important, let me know, but I doubt I'd get anything more out of it than I already have at this point.

Now, the point of bringing up this video is not to rehash old arguments, or to try to open old wounds, or even to try to bring affront to folks, but to show this as the starting point in my latest winding thought process about my beliefs, my views, and where I stand vis-a-vis the society around me. This video was really just one example of what I consider a much larger disconnect. I know I've talked about this before, but at the time I focused very heavily on religion, and while I consider that important, it's not the only point at which I differ from "my fellow Americans". I'll be mentioning it again here, but only as part of a larger picture.

So, before this conversation turns into what some people will no doubt interpret as angst and whining, let me establish what I mean when I say "this is not my tribe":

My politics are different.

When I say different here, I don't mean by a few degrees, either. I mean different. I am, very likely, sufficiently to the left and bottom of the average American as to be considered one of the "dangerous nutjobs". For those of you who haven't seen the Political Compass site, go take a look and take their test. The American public, by and large, falls in the top-right corner. Senator Kerry, contrary to popular opinion, was not a "leftist". He was merely less to the right than Bush. Nor was he a libertarian; he was merely less authoritarian than Bush. This country doesn't have a viable liberal/libertarian party. We have a center-right mildly authoritarian party and we have a far-right strongly authoritarian party, and these are painted as the political extremes. I'm so far outside the political extremes that I really don't even register on the map of the American political landscape. For those of you who are numbers-fetishists, I came in at -5.13 Economic (Left/Right) and -7.74 Social (Top/Bottom). By their calculations, that puts me at slightly more anarchistic than the Dalai Lama and only barely less collectivist.

My religion is different.

I warned you that I'd be mentioning this again, but this time it's with a little more data. The University of Minnesota's sociology department recently found in a study that atheists are America's most distrusted minority. As one of the estimated three percent of the American population that doesn't believe in a supreme being, I am by and large excluded from public debate on many issues, simply because of the assumption that I lack any sense of morality because I lack faith in a higher power. The two positions are by and large unrelated to each other, but they're inexorably wed in the minds of the typical American, and this keeps me from really having any voice on moral issues in public. It's not that I don't have opinions and beliefs, but that because I lack religious grounding they don't count nearly as much as others', no matter how ridiculous or obviously wrongheaded they might be. American culture has improved overall in its tolerance of differing moral and religious views, but when it comes to atheism it hasn't gotten any further than the 1950s when the Communists couldn't be trusted not to drop the bomb because God wasn't staying their hands.

My sexuality is different.

This one is such a big category that I'm really going to have to break it down into manageable chunks.

First and foremost, I'm a furry. Why include this under sexuality, you ask? Because to be quite blunt, the human form does not interest me sexually. Yes, I'm serious. The human body, by and large, does not push any of my buttons. It just... doesn't. This has several odd side effects, one of which is that a lot of marketing just slides off of me. If it's a product designed to make people look sexy, or if it's advertised in a fashion that plays up the sex factor, it's probably just not going to register with me, or if it does it's going to be a in a negative context. I don't "get" fashion, generally speaking. I mean, I undesrtand the purpose, but I don't really get the point, because I'm pretty much immune to the results.

This isn't to say that I don't find some people more attractive than others. I don't want this to come across as "you all look the same to me". That's not the case at all, and if that's the impression I'm giving then I'm doing it wrong. What I really am trying to say is that any sexual attraction I have to people is based on intellect and personality, not on looks. I do find some people physically interesting, and others physically uninteresting or even unappealing, but I can't say I've ever seen anyone that I thought was sex-worthy based solely on how zie looked.

This also isn't to say that I don't have a sex life. I do, and it's fairly dense if not exactly regular, but it's loaded with ideas that would probably leave a lot of people scratching their heads. I have a lot of kinks, and some of those probably don't even look like kinks to the outside world. If either of these strike you as funny, you probably understand what I mean.

All of that probably ties very heavily into my next bit, which is that even post-op, I'm still what I would consider as heavily dysmorphic. I don't like my body very much, I never have and I doubt I ever will. Being overweight doesn't help, but that honestly isn't even the root cause. I hate being tall. When I imagine myself, I'm still a little pudgy, maybe ten or fifteen pounds over ideal, but I'm short. Not impossibly short, not micro, but a much more reasonable five-foot-seven, maybe even up to five-nine if you really make me stretch. That's where I want to be, yet here I am towering in at six-foot-four. I hate it. Make no mistake, I loathe being this tall, for reasons that go far beyond my inability to find clothes that fit that I like, assuming I can even figure out what that would be. I'm not too keen about the hair I still have from my pre-transition days, but that's less disgust and more annoyance. It's something like my weight that I can fix, but that I know will take time and dedication. The height is what really kills me; it's beyond my ability to rectify, and it makes fighting with everything else really feel like a waste of time. Knowing I'll never get to where I really want to be, why extend the effort to fix anything else?

My relationships are different.

This is related to both sexuality and politics, but distinct enough from either that I think it deserves its own category. I'm polyamorous and polysexual, though not currently expressing either. Infidelity, to me, is what you do that your partners don't know about. If my wife's happiness is expanded by sleeping with someone else and I trust that person, then it expands my happiness by letting her do it, and vice versa. I believe that the question of whether same-sex marriage should be legalized is so antiquated that the very fact we have to ask it reveals an undercurrent of barbarism about our society that makes me uncomfortable. I support polygamous marriages, human-robot couplings, furry-human relationships, dogs and cats living together, and a whole host of other groupings that would probably make most mainstream Americans really disturbed. Jessie and I have invited others into our relationships, and while they haven't worked out in the long run that doesn't mean we've given up on the idea of it ever possibly happening.

Any one of these things would probably on its own take a social revolution to correct, perhaps even two or three to slowly bring society closer to the direction in which I think it ought to move, but each of these takes time, and rarely can more than one or two be fought at a time lest people burn out and give up out of apathy. Civil rights, equal rights, human rights, each of these fights had to happen on its own more or less in isolation, even if the underlying principles behind each are the same, because people still work on stereotypes and we still suffer from hindbrain diseases and poor biological programming. Right now I'm looking at so many struggles to make myself part of the mainstream that I can say I honestly don't believe it will happen within my lifetime.

When I make noises about "going to Canada", it's not that Canada is any better than America. It is in some ways, but it's more removed in others, with the added alienation of being an expat and even to some degree of "being an American", which has in recent years become something of a stigma, even if I'm nothing like the other people with whom I share a place of birth. Really, the cry is a desire to find a home whose laws and culture more closely resembles my own, but truth be told there really is no such place on earth right now. I mean, Canada's a step in the right direction, maybe even a couple of steps, but it might not really be any grand improvement in the long run.

Ideally, I'd join up with an anarchocollectivist Free State Project and take over Vermont or Washington State or the like. That, however, depends on there being as many "freaks" as I'd like to dream of there being, and of all of us being in a position to move to the same place to take over the local legislature and enact the kinds of laws that would make us happy. I can't really see that working out in the long run, but it's a great fantasy.

Come sail away with me.

2006-03-28T01:19:00.000-08:00

Where to begin, where to begin. Another month has passed, suggesting that I've been lax in keeping this up to date, which is in its own way true. I do prefer to try to post more regularly about the things that are happening, but it's proven to be a difficult habit for me to develop. I always feel as if the people who want to know what's happening will ask me, and the rest were there, and thus there's no need for me to tell them. I already have enough trouble with people reminding me that I don't need to repeat myself endlessly just to be understood, and so I sometimes forget that I have to... uh... peat myself first.

So far this month—and tail end of last—I've taken three business trips: one to Seattle for a week for a hand-off of a project from development to support, and two to Atlanta for training on the software I'm currently supporting. I know I've spoken at length before about business travel and the feeling that when I got to fly for my company, I would have achieved something significant in my career. Now that I'm flying for my company, though, suddenly there's a lot less glamour to it. "Glamour" is the word for it, too. It was a magical thing, going to airports to be there when my father walked off the plane. I still remember the smell of the experience, though I couldn't describe it except by meaningless and inaccurate comparison to other scents. Now that I'm the one leaving the plane, there's some small amount of glitter that's been wiped away from those memories. The magic isn't gone, but it's suddenly as if I've had the curtain drawn back on a mechanical marvel and all the gears and levers have been exposed. There's no more mystery and charm to it. It's just routine.

Is it that there never was any magic, and my dreams were ill-aligned with reality? Is that there could be magic in it, but I've "grown up" so much that I've forgotten how to see it? I couldn't say for sure. Years of being the responsible one can be a grind on the soul. I spent much of the last of those three trips watching the original SubGenius commercial and thinking about how it tied directly into my situation. "Acting dumb so they'll think you're one of them" is something I have often lamented in my life, and working at a warehouse around decidedly blue-class people makes it even worse.

I have to reiterate again, these are not bad people! These are not evil people! These are not stupid people! These are good people! These are intelligent people! These are moral people! However, they have been trained by society not to look behind the Wizard's curtain and wonder about how the world works, except as the idle pondering between the nth and (n+1)th beers on Saturday night, to be forgotten by n+2. They have values and thoughts and ideals that have been given to them by their peers, their betters and their culture and never have they stopped to ponder why and how those and not some other set. They talk of "football and porno and books about war" without any regard to what else may be out there. They are part of the Konspiracy by dint of not knowing the Konspiracy exists.

I over-generalize, of course. What good revolutionary firebrand doesn't? I'm sure somewhere else within this warehouse there exists someone who is not like this. I have not, however, met this person, nor have circumstances existed under which I could meet this person other than through coded hand-signs and a sly wink at the right moment, when the commissars' eyes are turned towards the new inspirational posters we have hanging over the breakroom. I think there's a like-minded malcontent in my department in Atlanta, if only because of some of the conversations we've had in the past, but we never have a chance to just hang out given the rarity with which I actually go down there and the lack of time away from work while I'm there. That, however, is "my team", which is not anywhere close to my office.

I do know that there is at least one glorp on my team, and this makes any potential discussions difficult during work hours, even when I'm down in Atlanta.

The job itself remains reasonably uninteresting. I've learned things about real-time production support, logistics, warehouse management, Oracle, COBOL, job automation, team leadership, personnel motivation and conflict resolution. None of these things mean a damn to me in the long run, but they're all nice buzzwords that I can slap on my résumé should I need to consider leaving the company. Hopefully that won't happen. I passed my one-year anniversary with nary a hiccough—yet—which means this has now been my second-longest running job, behind only ISI. With any luck, this will be The Big One, though of course I refuse nowadays to predict any such thing.

Of note, however, is that I know elsewhere I've mentioned my timetable for moving to Seattle to the corporate office as being on or around early 2008. This may be advanced sharply thanks to one of my coworkers already in that area. She mentioned in passing that she had an open position under her for an analyst doing pretty much what I'm doing now but from a second-tier support and development perspective, not a first-tier support role. She suggested if the requisition was still open that I should apply for it and that if I did, she'd be interested in acting on it as soon as she could. She didn't pose this to the team at large. She didn't mention to me that she had suggested this to anyone else in the group. If she told anyone else, she did so strictly on the sly. I think this means that she's interested in my skills in specific, knowing my background as a developer.

Not only did this give my ego an unexpected boost as I had gotten from an outside source an unrequested and unanticipated compliment on my skills, but it also may potentially accelerate my timetable for moving to the Left Coast. I have no idea how long it will take HR to process my application, how long it would take for the interview and transfer process, or even if the job is actually still available. She didn't know any of those things either. However, these things could theoretically still come together to make the move to Seattle happen some time this year. At the very least, it's given me hope that even if it doesn't happen this year, it's made the likelihood of it happening eventually much greater, at least with this company. If I'm not still with this company in two years, I have no idea where we'll be.

As a sideline to all of this, I've just finished refinancing the house again. A rise in home prices has again made it possible for me to roll the last of my credit card debt from The Bad into my mortgage. It's tapped out my equity, but I'm locked into a thirty-year fixed 80/20 mortgage. Even if interest rates continue to rise, I won't be hurt on my home loan. All of the interest on my monthly outlay is now deductible, which will help our tax returns. Plus, the new mortgage payment is less than I was paying in both monthly payments on the credit card and mortgage before, so we're actually saving money each month. That will help our ability to save for the future, which is really where I want to be focusing my attention.

Between the refi and the application, I feel as if I'm finally in a position to start looking forward again. Not just "to Seattle" that's a step, not a journey. Where are we going, ultimately? What will we be able to build? What do we want from our future? What can we expect from "society", and what will we have to construct ourselves?

We need a religion.

I'm going to say that again, because some of you out there are sniggering behind your hands, paws, tentacles, talons, whatever. We need a religion. We need an organized statement of beliefs, a manifesto, a list of commandments. We need a structure within which we are all free to define our ideals and our personal ideologies, but that can serve as an umbrella organization under which we can all fit. We need a method of presenting outselves to the world at large not just as a collection of individuals, but as a movement. Dare I say we need to become a subculture?

I want to straddle the line between modernism and postmodernism. I want to proclaim both that there is always a hidden subtext and that not every hidden subtext is meaningful. I want to acknowledge the contexts and biases of statements without abolishing the intended meanings. I want to deconstruct without destroying. I want the flexibility to say there are multiple interpretations of an idea without losing the ability to say that some interpretations are wrong. I want to reject the idea that there is only ever one right answer without throwing away the idea of "right".

If the process of movement from human to posthuman is transhumanism, then would this be transmodernism?

We are evolving. We are changing, growing, becoming. Our understanding of the world shifts from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute, guided by the contents of our brains and the impulses entering them at every interval. The statements we make today are not true for all time, but they are true at that moment, and for however long the unstated framework upon which those statements rely remains valid. Ultimate truth is unknowable because infinite knowledge is impossible, but within the realm of what we know and believe to be true, we can make pronouncements about our world and our reality that do hold up to scrutiny, as long as we never forget the assumptions under which we're operating. If those assumptions change, then what we claim to be true as a result must be re-examined. It may not always be that what we think is true turns out not to be, but we should never shy away from the possibility that we make mistakes.

I want a world in which I can say tomorrow, "I was wrong yesterday", and have that be acceptable.

Yes, I am intolerant of intolerance. Yes, I am bigoted against bigots. Discrimination is transitive. There is room in my worldview at once to say that there is freedom for each person to believe as zie wishes, and to say that there is no room in my world for those who will not make room in their world for others. The surest and fastest way to convince me that you're wrong about something is to state that you're the only one who is right. Under the transmodernist umbrella, there is room for an infinite number of ideas, but some simply will not fit, and I'm okay with that.

It's a beautiful world we live in, a sweet romantic place.

2006-02-22T01:15:00.000-08:00

This feels like a maintenance post. No great weight sits upon my shoulders. No meaty social issues currently constrain my thoughts. No horrible demons lurk just behind my eyes demanding attention. I figure all in all I've been doing a fairly good job of tending my baobobs, and that's meant fewer emotional collapses and less drama all around, which is pretty much a good thing.

To be sure, there have been a few issues that hover around the fringes of my perception. My internal network at home is intermittently dying for no apparant reason, and it has since the power failure last week that took down the server for a few hours. I suspect that in the power loss-return-loss cycle, one of the hubs got damaged. It's nothing earth-shattering, but it's a nuisance I'd rather not have to face right now. The sociopolitical environment outside the Lapinian Consulate remains tense and unwelcoming, but it's always tense and unwelcoming even when it's warn and inviting. This is merely the way of rabbits, and I'm adapting and accepting over time. I doubt the world will change enough in my lifetime to ever make me want to participate in society in any way other than the bare minima required to sustain myself and my family financially, but stepping outside my door doesn't actively invite death either from other people or my own head. My weight isn't where I want it to be, but I've taken a few baby steps in the direction of dealing with it and the feedback I've gotten has been mostly positive. It's going to take a while, but I hope these things will sort themselves out in time with a bit more effort.

I think the one big issue currently weighing on my mind is the trip I have upcoming. Three weeks ago, I flew down to Atlanta for team meetings and group training. Now they're flying me to Seattle for a week for more meetings with a different team on a new project for which I've "volunteered". To be sure, I wanted to be involved, but not so centrally. This project has the feel of "make-or-break" on it. It's something the business wants very much but that the support staff thinks in general is not a good idea, so if we can make it work, it'll be a big boost, but ~~when~~ if we have to cancel it, it could look ugly. I doubt I'd lose my job over it if it went poorly, but I'm lapine enough never to trust raw assurances.

This whole "business travel" thing still has me mystified, tired and a little tittilated. I've always loved to travel, and I know I've commented before on this fact, but I also know I've mentioned that the heyday of business travel is behind us. At least, it seems like it. At my level, I fly coach, I'm on the cheapest fares and the least convenient times, and I have to carry my own suitcase. I spend long hours away from home, but I know it's because I'm important enough to the company that they're willing to spend money on sending me places. I love living out of a hotel, but eating out all the time gets tiresome and sometimes I just want to cook a comforting meal. I love to go and see new places, but I always look forward most to coming home.

If anybody in Seattle over the next week wants to try to arrange a time to meet, email me and I'll send you my PCS number. I'll be staying at the Silver Cloud Eastgate, 14632 Southeast Eastgate Way, Bellevue, WA 98007. I won't have a car, but I should have my evenings to myself unless my manager decides to keep me chained.

I'm refinancing my house again, the second time in a year. The first time it was to consolidate debt and I was damn glad for the chance to do that, but my credit score was pretty low thanks to The Bad and my job situation was brand new and still a little shaky, so I got a pretty poor interest rate on a 3/27 Fixed-to-ARM. If none of that bit makes any sense, don't worry. It didn't to me at first either. Mortgages typically come in two main types, depending on whether the interest rate can change over time or not. If it can, it's adjustable. If it can't, it's fixed. Fixed interest rates typically save people money in the long run, but they're usually reserved for people who have great credit or who can afford to pay a large amount up front on a house. Adjustable-rate mortgages change with the prime lending rate set by the Federal Reserve, so every time you hear Ben Bernanke talk about raising interest rates, all those people who have an adjustable-rate mortgage pay a little more out of pocket on their houses. They tend to be more expensive in the long run, but anyone can get them. The fixed-to-ARM program is a hybrid of these ideas, giving the borrower a short window during which the interest rate will remain steady regardless of what the market does. Then, at the end of that window, the interest rate on the mortgage jumps to what it would have been had it been tracking the Fed's rate changes all the way along and becomes adjustable from there. It's great if you expect to refinance your house again in a short amount of time, or if you plan on selling the property within the fixed-rate time period.

This may actually happen for Jessie and I.

This is where the rest of my job weirdness enters into the playing field. My department doesn't really have any need for any more team leads right now. We've got a team lead, and he does a damned fine job as a team lead, but he's also not fully employed as a team lead because he's still having to serve as a principal support analyst on a lot of issues. He's an Analyst IV. I'm an Analyst III. Until the IV is fully working as an IV, there's no need for any more IVs on the team. This means that there's no room for promotion in my current department. If I want to advance faster than the cost-of-living adjustments, I have to leave my current department, or my current company. Assuming for the moment that I want to stay with T-Mobile—because I do—that means having to switch to another group. However, to do that I'm going to have to move. There are no other groups in my current facility, because my facility is a warehouse, not a corporate office. The only things open to me here are management jobs I don't want, and production jobs paying half or less my current salary.

T-Mobile's corporate offices are in Tampa, Atlanta and Seattle. Anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line is right out, if only for the weather, to say nothing of the political culture. This means that if I want to get anywhere in my company any time soon, I'm going to have to relocate to the Left Coast. This isn't an immediate thing, and it's obviously not a guaranteed thing, but to borrow from the Torino Scale, the likelihood of moving is somewhere around a five. It's not certain, but it's non-zero, and the most likely alternate scenario involves changing jobs, something I'm loath to do if I can avoid it. I've never worked at the same company longer than eighteen months, unless you count my stint as a teaching assistant at the University of North Texas, which was a year of three overlapping part-time jobs.

I figure the timescale on this is somewhere around the beginning of 2008 if it's going to happen, which should be coincidentally right around the point at which I've finished paying off my past debt. I like the significance of this. I like the cosmic unity. It means nothing, but it looks pretty, and that counts for a lot for me. I can choose to interpret it as symbolic if I wish, a new start in a new city and a new goal. In trying to find references to my past discussion on travel, I instead found the post wherein I discussed my desire to make a plan for the future, and putting down the last of my negative past feels like a good start to that. I'll be free of past burdens and ready to take on new challenges. I'll be able to face the future. From here, it looks like the kind of event that cries out for a commemorative print in Reconstructivist style, faces in a row along the bottom-right upturned towards rays of light from the top-left corner, wearing vapid two-tone smiles with a Cyrillic propaganda slogan beneath it.

In any case, this all started with a discussion of refinancing the house, and I'm going with a 3/27 because of the need to plan for the contingency of moving cross-country, but it also serves to pull down my interest rate another half-point beneath what I'd get if I went strictly with a fixed-rate mortgage. That means in the short run I'll be saving myself another thirty dollars a month, which amounts to a free box of Fudge Stripes for th' qiti every other day. Our Feline Mistresses must be appeased.

This will also mean I have more money to throw at the credit card, which might even advance the timeline by which we've paid off our back debt. That would break the nice little synchronicity above, but it would also save us some finance charges, and I'm unspiritual enough—or perhaps sufficiently capitalist—to destroy universal harmony to save a few bucks. It would also mean that if we move to Seattle, we do so with a nest egg and the chance to put some more money down on a house, or some more stock to start earning dividends, or a nest egg for emergencies. The less money we have to spend paying off the corporate masters, the more money we have to support ourselves and move towards self-sufficiency.

It's not that I enjoy being the ant; it's that I've been the grasshopper.