I put them on yesterday morning, and I'm still wearing them this morning. I had them off for a brief period of emotional instability yesterday afternoon, but then I was wearing them again inside of an hour.

Part of me is quietly disgruntled that I'm doing something as an exercise in self-delusion, and that's been one of my biggest fears for so long that the internal suggestion of pulling the wool over my own eyes, for any reason, makes me want to stop what I'm doing instantly and atone to some nameless deity for trying to lie to myself. I'm not, though. I'm not lying to myself about what I'm doing. I'm fully aware that when I look down and I see my shirt stretched out over my chest that it's not really me that's causing it. That doesn't stop me from smiling when I look in the mirror at seeing what I wanted to see when I first started my transition.

Even now, I find saying the word "breastform" out loud to be difficult. "Fake tits," while closer, is something to be said with a self-deprecating snicker, and thus isn't what I want. There is a part of my psyche that says that having gone through this entire process without wearing them, to do so now is somehow to cheapen what I've already done and rob it of its meaning. I don't wear makeup to cover my shadow. I don't lie about my past. I recognize that I'm not where I want to be yet, and I live with it. I don't try to hide behind crutches.

Why, then, does the simple act of putting on a shirt and having to work around my own chest make me smile the way I did when I first put on a skirt and went for a walk outside?

If anything, everything I've done before has been the "self-delusion", saying that I was happy with my body as it was. Yes, I want to be heavy-chested. Perhaps not as large, proportionately, as some of my friends, but definitely
bigger than I am now. I've wanted this since the beginning of the changes. I've known that when I crossed my arms across my chest that I wanted to feel my own breasts resting on my forearms, and that even with the forms I'm wearing now they don't quite feel large enough in that regard. I have such a hangup about feeling like I'm lying, to myself or to anyone else, that even openly saying that I want something like this I'm having to fight internally because I feel like I'm making statement that this is what I already am, not that this is what I want.

As Jessie pointed out, I was using the ladies' bathrooms for eighteen months before I had my surgery. I could say nobody could see what I had under my crotch, but with some of the cuts of jeans I like to wear that's not true
either.

I'm not comfortable wearing these in public, but I've started to investigate alternatives.

---

Work is actually going well. I know since saying I had a job I hadn't really said anything else about my position, but that's mostly because in the last two months I haven't had the time to actually do much beyond work.

I've always said that I would rather be too busy than too bored. This job promises to test my belief in that idea.

I'm currently working with Bennie at an Evil Data Collection Company, which is to say my job consists primarily of taking slices out of a McHuge pile of data and serving them up to clients, or else I'm taking client data and then cleaning it and checking it against ours for consistency. It sounds fairly dull, and a lot of the job can be repetitive, but with the way the office runs it's rarely a dull moment, and those are usually a welcome reprieve from the rest of the craziness. 

Working with someone that was already a friend prior to the job has been an excellent boost to my morale about the company. My ramp-up time has been incredibly quick, and within a week I felt like I was being a productive
part of the team. The fact that I received a task that has literally taken me from my second week to next Tuesday to finish has been proof that my role here is fairly safe. This project is almost certain to be a repeat one, and every time I do it I get slightly better at it, which is a good sort of stability.

I know I bitch about the salary thing a lot, but I really do feel like I'm being underpaid. I have, in the two months that I've worked there, left half an hour early on three days, and put in at least three twelve-plus hour shifts to finish up projects that had to be done by a certain deadline. I can only hope that at the end of my six-month "trial period," my manager and the HR guy see the effort I've done as worthy of being rewarded. I've already been promised at least another five grand a year. I'd like to think I've proven myself worth more than that.

Sadly, I'm finding that the more money I have, the more things I find on which to spend that money. I've still got to get out of debt, but at the same time I'd like to be able to start planning for my eventual retirement and I've also
got getting into a house to consider. Then, too, there's everything that the aforementioned topic will cost to fix. Plus, that Jessie's asked me on a few occasions now to look into school and the associated costs. While in the long run I see that as a step towards larger income, I know in the short run that it will cost me more money that I'm going to need to start setting aside today to cover.

Right now, getting into a house seems like the fastest means of getting more income on the table. If I can get a duplex or triplex, or even a large enough single-occupancy house to give Kelly her own space, it should cost me less to manage than staying in an apartment. The extra money from that will free up immediate budgetary concerns. Putting money away towards retirement is a lofty ideal, but sadly I know it needs to wait until I can get other things paid off. Fourteen percent interest trumps ten percent dividends.

Life never stops throwing curve balls. It's all a question of how much effort one wants to spend in trying to catch them.

Money right now is really tight. I'm making more than I was on unemployment, but our bills have gone up by a larger factor than my income has, and the recent spate of expenses related to hosting the Bash this year have all taken their toll on the available money. Plus, I've been cutting some friends short-term loans. None of these are really a problem, but I keep forgetting I only get paid twice a month now, instead of every two weeks, meaning the money I make on each paycheck has to go just a wee bit further than it did before, and that stretching is hurting.

Right now, I'm in the precarious position of needing to wait until my paycheck clears to be able to pay rent. This should happen tonight, but then again I thought it would happen this morning and it didn't, so I'm staring at a bank account balance that may well dip briefly into the negative before everything catches up with where it's supposed to be. I hate it when that happens, I really do. I've got overdraft protection, but that's going to cost me if it triggers, and I can't really afford any more fees right now.

At least I know I'm getting a good chunk of change on Friday.

The budget woes are not directly responsible for my next big mindgame, but they do play a significant factor. I've become increasingly aware in recent weeks just how unsatisfied I am with the results of my transition. It isn't that I wish I hadn't started; nothing could be further than the truth. It's that I got seventy percent of what I wanted up top, eighty-five to ninety percent of what I wanted below, ninety percent of what I wanted on my voice, fifty percent from the laser, et cetera, and when you start multiplying all these percentages, the actual success rate seems very small.

I pass fine, but I'm still not really happy with what I see, and there just isn't the money right now to pay for any more changes, and what changes remain are all the costly ones like more electro to clear the last of my facial hair, surgery to increase my bust size, and the like. Maybe even a depth increase since I didn't take care of myself after my surgery the way I should have. 

That last is way down on the priority list, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't want it.

I considered for a while experimenting with falsies, but every time I think about it, I feel really icky and for the longest time I could never figure out why it bothered me as much as it did. I think I understand why, now. When
I started my transition, every time I undressed after spending a weekend or a day or an hour or whatever in what I considered proper dress, I would start crying uncontrollably. The illusion disappeared when I took away the trappings, and that distressed me greatly. Now, I'm afraid of going through that disappointment again. I know they're fake, and so trying them on will only make me upset when I have to stop.

Sadly, that seems to be my best option right now. At least, it's my most affordable one.

My credit card is still over ten thousand dollars in debt, which is a source of great frustration. I'm slowly paying the backlog of bills, but the number is intimidating. I owe more money right now than I'm worth in terms of hard assets, and that's a difficult thing to face. I hope by next year some time I'll be in an actual house and paying towards equity, but that's just a pipe dream for now.

So many things come down to money. I wish they didn't.

So far, I have to say my new job has been going exceptionally well. The hardest part of it, I think, is getting up in the morning consistently and making myself presentable and at least semi-coherent by the time I have to be at Bennie's to carpool into the office. Working with someone I know has been great; it's really helped me get into the swing of things quickly. It doesn't hurt that he's been a good teacher, giving me enough to do that I'm almost never bored while not giving me so much that I feel overwhelmed by the amount on my plate.

I got my first paycheck today, which was exceptionally nice. I do have to say, though, that I wish it were higher. It's still weird to think of the fact that I'm now making about three-fourths of my previous salary, and only gettings two paychecks a month instead of one every two weeks (twenty-four pay periods, instead of twenty-six) makes that nice "bonus paycheck" a thing of the past. Still, that would really have to be the only major downside to my job, and with the perk of getting lunch on the company dime, I'm probably still coming out even.

Actually, having the company order lunch has been an exceptional boon to my budget, because I'm dieting again. Between the depression of being out of work, and the bad attitude borne of not wanting to think about stressful
things while I had other, more important, stressful things about which to worry, I found one morning recently that the scale said "EE" when I stood upon it. Now, that could be considered one of my goals, but not that one, and it was a rather rude shock. I always said, at least to myself, that I would never break three-hundred again, and I had. So, now I eat a diet-food breakfast, a diet-food dinner, and have my one decent meal at the company's expense. This means that when Lean Pockets are on sale, I'm only spending two dollars a day on food, plus whatever diet soda costs if the fridge at work is empty.

The utter lack of self-pity that staying true to oneself and one's values requires is, I think, one of the hardest things in life to have and to keep. I find it far too easy to wallow in self-deprecation and bemoan what has not gone my way, rather than actually fix things and keep them fixed. Things that take constant and repetitive maintenence, especially ones that aren't fun in and of themselves, are very difficult for me. Dieting isn't just once; it's for life. I am not the sort of person that, once at an ideal weight, can eat whatever whenever and not gain it all back. Keeping up with dilation and exercise has been difficult as well, despite the desirability of the end-goals, because the path to get there is work. Even DDR hasn't been "fun," though I do enjoy the activity, at least for a while.

Someone asked me recently, "what is Hare?" The question seems like a non sequitur, but the answer isn't. To me, hare is the admission of helplessness. She's the recognition and divestiture of defense mechanisms, lies, deceits and self-absolutions. She is not that which leads me astray, but that which lets me recognize when I have led myself astray, and then bring myself back.

Through Hare, I find within myself the courage to stand naked, stripped of self-delusion. There is much about myself that I do not like, but I have the strength to recognize these things, not to hide from them. I hate dieting, but I hate being fat. I hate dilating, but I hate being too tight and too shallow. I hate exercising, but I hate being out of shape. In Hare, I have the power to admit these things, and to work on fixing them. Hare is not the solution, but she is the understanding of the problem.

Nobody stays in Atlantis by faking reality in any manner whatsoever. 

Last Friday, I took my car back into the shop because it's been stalling on me. I don't just mean "sometimes it dies and I have to restart it," either. If that were all it were doing, I could live with that. I had a Chrysler that did that for several years before its electricals finally gave up in the middle of an intersection in downtown Dallas during rush hour. No, I mean it stops and refuses to start for at least ten minutes, then belches forth the most noxious cloud of unburnt gasoline imaginable, and then has a fifty to sixty percent chance of stalling again immediately upon dropping the gear from park or neutral back into drive. It did this once as I was taking Jessie to work, and my mate was late because of it, so I figured it was time to once again have the thing in the shop.

Now, this is the third time since I've gotten it that I've had to have it repaired for various issues relating to stopping or not starting. First I had to tow it because it wouldn't start at all. Then I had to drive it to the shop because it would stall and refuse to start. Then for a while it was fine, but after about two weeks it would start stalling on me. However, during this period it just restarted when I turned the key again, and I figured I could live with that until I had a job and could afford to get it into the shop or get it replaced. Now it's doing exactly what it did before, and I have again put it to the shop.

This time, though, the mechanic said that he let it sit for two hours on idle, and he gave it some test drives, and he could never make it stall. He surmised that the transmission was b0rqed, that something called the torque converter was shot because late-eighties Chryslers were known for problems with whatever device in the engine exists for converting torque. He told me to take it to his transmission specialist to get this piece of repairwork done, and not knowing anything about cars other than how to operate them, I took his advice. 

The transmission mechanic called me back yesterday afternoon and said, "I had a look, and the transmission is fine, but did you know you're in the danger zone as far as oil goes?"

At this point, I must digress and discuss an old RPG called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. This game, which I received when I was probably fourteen or so, is one of the things that strongly cemented my
interest in furry, and for the longest time I thought this game was one of the coolest on earth because you got to play an animal. How cool was that? None of this boring human nonsense. Animals were cool.

If this wasn't cool enough for you, the supplements they made for the game, with the exception of Adventures and Transdimensional, all related not to TMNT's original world but to Palladium's own post-apocalyptic update to the
setting, called After the Bomb. After the Bomb, or AtB, was the shiznit of settings. It had talking animals. It had magic. It had superhero powers. It had post-holocaust nuclear fallout. It had everything. It was Gamma World
for the kids who never got to play Gamma World, and for the kids that did, it was everything about Gamma World that was cool, without TSR. Mind you, it had Palladium instead, which was trading the hangman for the firing squad, but at least it was something.

Then, as if AtB wasn't enough, Palladium released the supplement to, at the time, end all supplements: Road Hogs. This added the element of fast cars and vehicular combat to the game, meaning it could now appeal to the people who played Steve Jackson's Car Wars as well, and if this didn't get you, you were hopelessly outside the sphere of cool. I ate this stuff up with a spoon when I was that age, and I adored the ideas spawned by the game.
Never mind that ten years later I would look back at all this fascination and money and time spent and laugh my head off at my own foolishness. At the time, I was seriously all over this stuff.

Road Hogs gives all sorts of rules for various mechanics that you can have working on your car, all the way from apprentice in the craft up to the Lord God Guru Wrenchmaster or whatever they called the chief expert. One type, however, fell squarely outside the range of good, bad and guitarist: the mechanical empath. This person wasn't really a mechanic, but a doctor of sick machines, and zie instinctively just knew what was wrong and how to make them work again. Zie could do stuff to an engine, a car or a water-recycler that would look totally unrelated to the actual problem, and have the thing humming along smoothly without effort. I always
thought these were the best.

Unfortuntely, the mechanical empath had one major drawback if you used that type of person to fix your vehicles: anything fixed by them would only stay fixed as long as they hung around. Outside some fixed radius, machines that they built or repaired would start to malfunction again, and ordinary mechanics couldn't fix them. Only the empath had the know-how to figure out what they really wanted and make them happy again, and eventually if away from their loving masters for long enough machines would just up and die, fall to spare parts and used oil, and there was nothing anyone else could do. Often, even rebuilding them wouldn't help.

There are times I fear that this is the power that Tanya's father wields.

The mechanic to whom I've been taking this car since I received full possession of it has outright said to me, "I can't figure out why it's stalling." Tanya said to me when she gave me the car that it had an oil leak, but that if I just put in a quart of oil every time the idiot light flickered, I would be fine. I actually put two into it every time, because I killed my last car by driving it without enough oil for too long. I still managed to get it so low that the transmission guy chastised me for it. 

I am hoping beyond hope that the problem of stalling is related directly to the fact that the car is leaking oil at a fast enough rate to have been keeping the engine below optimal running conditions but not so fast that it's been taking the gunk out of the sump with it. I'm five thousand miles past when my sticker says I should've changed it, mostly because I figured if I was leaking oil as fast as the idiot light indicated, I couldn't possibly have a build-up of crap in the oil pan. I've known plenty of cars that operated on that very principle.

Not that I'm hoping I've been driving without enough oil, mind you. As I said above, that's why the Escort—the car Kelly's now driving until she gets her Firebird fixed—rattles like a cocaine baby with a plastic hammer and teething problems. I just hope that by fixing this leak, somehow miraculously the other problems I'm having with the car will go away until I can make it to and from Michigan for Jessie's brother's wedding reception and the start of my job. After that, I can start looking for a vehicle more suited to my style of driving. That is, something I can beat into the ground through neglect and that will love me for doing it.

I hate cars. I think they know that, and they fear me for it.

I am officially again a member of the rank-and-file. I have, for the time being, escaped the crack into which I had fallen three months prior. Starting next Wednesday, I will be working with a friend of mine at HMS Online in their fulfillment department, writing scripts and generating data files. After just over four months, I'll be back to work.

I don't think I ever really appreciated how much I enjoyed working until I wasn't. It seems strange to me even now to say it, but it's true. Lacking a job was an incredibly stressful situation. If I had been independently wealthy, maybe I would've enjoyed it, but I wasn't and I'm still not and I won't be for quite some time, though I am putting into motion a plan to fix that. It should only take me fifteen years. At least it's not get-rich-quick.

The job actually sounds like the sort of thing I could really get into doing. It's not high-scale project development, but in a sense I'll be in direct and total control of every project that comes across my desk, and I'll be responsible for the resultant work that goes out to clients. It feels a little like being back at Intervoice, when I would get projects and be the sole developer on them from beginning to end. They weren't this large-scale, but it's the same basic idea.

Mostly, I'm just glad to have a regular income again. Sucking on the  government tit is not only embarrassing, it's demoralizing. I know at any point I could've gone and gotten a day-job at McSlavey's or ReichBurger or GreedMart or whatever, but I think if I had I would've taken a massive hit to my self-esteem, an even larger one than I had when I lost my job. It really did hit me pretty hard, a fact I struggled not to let affect me greatly, but it was hard.

In fact, the only thing about this job that I have to say I don't  like from the outset is the fact that I'm taking what amounts to over a twenty percent paycut from my last job. However, considering it's a twenty percent increase over my unemployment benefits which end in two months, I'm not going to complain too loudly. Plus, they've already said that in six months I'm up for a performance-based salary review, and that if they keep me at that time I should be seeing a substantial pay increase. It still won't be what I was getting before, but it's a lot better than nothing.

Plus, the work itself promises to be fun. Having seen the stress through which my coworker-to-be has had with the position, "fun" doesn't seem like the most appropriate word. However, now we'll both be working with someone we know, which is always a plus. The workload will be divided between us, which will be good for him. This sounds at least on the surface like the kind of work I'm bound to enjoy, which is a definite plus. To top it all, I've met some of the other coworkers at the company, and they all seem like good people and apparently I made a good impression on them. 

I can't wait to start.

---

Sadly, no good deed ever goes unpunished, and to make up for my happiness in getting a job, the newish car that Tanya secured for me has decided to return to its state of unhappiness at existence in general. Shortly after I got it, it died at one point and refused to start. I had it towed to the mechanic's and he fixed it. After that, it started but every so often it would stall and refuse to start for ten minutes afterwards. I drove it to the mechanic's that time, and they again fixed it. About a week after that, it started stalling on me again, but every time it stalled I was able to start it immediately without issue, so even though I considered this a great annoyance, I told myself I would get it fixed at such time as I had a job with which to pay for the repairs.

Today it stalled on me again as I was taking Jessie to work, and it again wouldn't start after it died. Further, when it did start after dying, it died again when I dropped it from park into drive. It did this four times getting it to Jessie's workplace. Then it stalled again getting it home.

This seems almost too cosmically coincidental for works. Nightshade, if you did anything recently to get rid of your 2x4, I think I know where it went. Damn thing won't leave me alone.

It's never died on a freeway, so I think I can trust the engine. However, at this point I don't think I can trust anything else on the car. I'm going to take it to my mechanic one last time and ask them to find everything on the
car that needs to be fixed and get an estimate for the repairs. I have another vehicle that I can borrow from a friend in the meantime, and hopefully either I'll find out that the repairs are within a reasonable margin, or I'll find
out they're not and can get another car as a replacement.

Maybe I can trade the Acclaim back to Tanya for the Lincoln she was going to give me in the first place. *grin*

I suppose the fact that this entry isn't actually a joke is, itself, the biggest joke of them all. I just don't know who the butt of this joke is.

I bought DDR MAX for the PS2 today. Some time ago, Jessie picked up a pad that EB had pennied out of inventory, so we had the controller sitting around the apartment, unused. I remember saying when I first saw it in an arcade that, if the music were good, I might be interested in trying to play it. However, in very short order it became überpopular, and anyone who knows me can probably guess what sort of result that had on my interest.
Still, I tried it a few times, but every time the game greeted me with such horrible screeching that I failed miserably, unable to focus on the actual gameplay.

I'd been looking at the copy at the EB where Jessie works for a while, but today I finally took the plunge. The back of the package said it had a bunch of songs in a vast array of styles, meaning I figured I had a good chance of finding at least a few songs to which I could listen without bleeding from my ears. To my surprise, the first song I found when I actually played it was a cover of Duran Duran's "Ordinary World," which I think is eminently listenable. Perhaps I'm just getting old, but most of the rest of the music was at least endurable, if not particularly memorable. Even the few tracks I outright didn't like, I could probably survive long enough to play. If not, it's not like I have to listen to them. Unless I want to unlock everything. Damn my OCD.

Actually, the biggest impediment to my doing any good at this game appears to be my staggering lack of rhythm and balance. The sensitivity of the pad is such that I have to lift my feet to put them back down; I can't just tap
my foot and have it count. This means that in any complex pattern with the same button being hit often, I have to sort of stagger-hop to make it work, which throws off my ability to do anything else. I'm going to have to learn
how to not look like I've had six beers and a shot of everclear laced with Kool-Aid before playing.

Now I just have to not feel like a fool while playing. I suppose in time if I keep working at it that I'll get decent enough to do myself some good, which is another reason I got it. Anything I can do to burn calories is a positive. Right now, I can use all the help I can get.

---

I had my first interview in three months on Monday. It was with a recruiter, not a real company, but it's better than nothing. Still, I came away from that meeting not really sure what to think. The agent with whom I spoke
really didn't seem to be technically minded himself, and that always bothers me. I can't help but feel that people who don't know at least a little about the technology for which they're recruiting people can't do the best job in
selling technical people to technical companies. No offense to the person with whom I spoke, but I felt a bit like I'd been passed through a living buzzword filter.

I suppose in a twisted fashion, it's my own fault. I don't have the sort of skillset or résumé that can easily be summed up in a few short words. I have three years of job history, just over a year of actual work at those jobs, and ten years of academic and personal training in the skills that I know. I list PERL and C as the languages that I know, but I've used over half a dozen languages since I started and I could write professionally in any of them; it's just a matter of learning the syntax and then practicing until I don't need a book to remember the function names. I don't have any formal object methodologies, but I understand object-oriented programming. I've got too much experience to be entry-level or intern, but not enough to be mid-level or higher. I'm not a junior, but I'm not a senior. 

Adding to this confusion is the fact that in the last three years, I've held five jobs. Kinetic reneged on my employment contract. FlashNet hired me by mistake, advertising for "system engineer" instead of "system
administrator" and then not making it clear what my job duties would be until I'd been working for them for nearly a month. Raytheon sold the division of the company into which I'd been hired to L-3, who then had no work for me to do. ISI dissolved my department out from under me while I was on medical leave, then refused to move me into a dpeartment that had anything for me to do because of a hiring freeze. CRS laid me off. At no point did I ever quit any job outright. Either the company had nothing for me to do, or what the company wanted me to do wasn't why I took the job in the first place.

Unfortunately, most companies these days don't care about the reasons. They only care about the number of previous positions I've held. I look like a job-hopper, and I'm not. At least, I don't think of myself that way. I've been trying to find a single, stable company at which to put in my twenty years of service, like my father did at IBM. So far, every company I've thought would be like that has turned out not to be like that at all, which is highly upsetting. I want the comfort of knowing that the job I do today will be the job I do tomorrow, next month, next year. I don't want to stagnate, but I don't want every two years to be at a new company. I'm tired of starting
over at the bottom anew every time I turn around. 

Now if only this recruiter can find some place for me that understands that.

I wish I knew right now what I was feeling. My emotions are this tightly knotted mass of disjoint and tangled threads that all interleave into a Gordian Knot, matching the lump in my stomach that refuses to settle.

Shay moved out this morning. Like when Tanya left, I didn't get to say good-bye. I'm not sure I could have. I don't even know if I wished I could. I wish I'd had the option, but if I had could I have not done it? I feel at once like I failed her as a sister, like I failed myself as a protector and guardian, and like she failed me as a friend. Buried deeply beneath the mask she wears is the person I invited into my family, but that person is so deeply hidden that I sometimes question whether it existed at all, and I hate saying that because that can only lead me to question whether asking her to be a member of my extended family was worth the effort at all, which means so many months of wasted effort and so many resources poured into a black hole.

I feel a bit like a failure towards my mate, as well, in spite of the assurances to the contrary. It's not my place to discuss reasons or details, but the short form is that I got very pushy about something that I didn't need to push, then caught the brunt of an emotional blast caused by many more things than just the moment's excess. Things just slowly seemed to slide from there, until finally Jessie and I sort of crawled into bed and I fell apart.

Usually, a good night's sleep is all I need to recover from these kinds of divots, but today I find myself no better than last night. If anything, I feel worse because now I have the sense that I should have gotten better and didn't, and I don't know why. I've had Elton John's "The Panic In Me" off of the El Dorado soundtrack stuck in my head since I woke up, and it certainly hasn't helped.

I'm having a horrible time controlling my weight right now. My height is still upsetting to me, and I have trouble believing that it will ever be "acceptable" to me. At best, it will be "tolerable," but that's hardly the same thing. Unfortunately, at least partly because of this immutable and unwanted truth about my physical form, keeping the
rest of the things I can control in check has been much harder than I would like.

I haven't dilated in months now, again. That, like my weight, is one of those things that I wish would just happen but that I can't seem to make happen by myself, a fact that bothers me even more than before. Jessie used to complain about the effort involved in hair-removal, and I always said that if zie really wanted it badly enough zie would find the will to make it happen, but that's not true and recognizing that makes me feel even more out-of-sorts. I have so many things that, if I had the will, I would simply do, but that never get done for one reason or
another. It certainly isn't that I don't want them. It's that I can never make myself stick with them.

Today is the one-year anniversary of my surgery, not counting differences in timezones and other negligible details. I've only ever made love with Jessie once, and despite how desperately I want to be able to do it again, I can't seem to spend the effort it takes to stay on top of what I have to do to make myself ready for it. I should be happy that it's been a year since I did this. I should be ecstatic that my surgical scars have all healed according to every medical text. I'm only disappointed in my own inability to live up to my expectations.

I still don't have a job. My creative endeavors are all languishing in pieces. One of the players in my weekly Werewolf game won't make it this week and may have to drop out, which might end up killing the story. I
couldn't even look at the scale this morning. My unemployment checks haven't arrived yet this week, and I've got a pile of bills I need to pay. 

It's very hard for me not to feel like a failure right now.

---

It's now 19h00 by my desktop clock, and while I can't say I feel better than I did this morning, I'm not suffering from it in any immediate sense. More than anything, it feels "behind." It's no longer an immediate and crippling sensation but a painful memory. More than anything, right now I just feel sort of blah. I fell back into bed as soon as I stopped writing this morning, and I didn't get up until five minutes ago. I woke up several times during that period, but I never managed to overcome inertia enough to actually go do anything.

I really didn't feel like there was anything to do, I suppose. I had no reason to leave the bed. I'm sure I could've found semi-productive things on which to work, like the renown backlog for my Werewolf game or any one
of a hundred different stories that I have pending for one reason or another, but likely if I had gotten out of bed I would've spent the day spodding with Xenosaga, trying to get chaos to level fifty to see his last deathblow (I
know the game calls them Tech Attacks, but I agree with the people at GameFAQs that say that's a lame translation). 

Spod is a powerful thing. It's any activity that's a timewaster, that you know is a timewaster, that you can do with minimal effort or concentration. By "timewaster," I mean an activity whose goal is ultimately unimportant. Ship-in-a-bottle building or writing JAPHs are not spod; they have some sort of vaguely tangible outcome. Playing pick-up sticks with yourself is spod, unless you're deliberately trying to build your hand-eye coordination.

The typical example of spod is endlessly levelling characters in a console RPG long past the point of being able to beat the game, and I excel at it. Most of the games I've played, I have a save-state somewhere on a memory card or floppy disk that's designated my spod state, and I've likely hit the final boss but have backtracked to some area of the final dungeon or another and just sit and take on fight after fight to pick up stuff and gain experience. Usually, this is to see just how high I can push the experience point counter or the HP counter or some other numerical statistic. 

I've been spodding with Xenosaga a lot lately. I beat the game five days after I got it, but the ending was so phenomenally unrewarding that I keep playing it because I feel like I got no closure out of it. That and, frankly,
I'm tired of everything else I've got at the moment and nothing else new will be out for a while that interests me, and so Xenosaga has been my drug of choice during the long, empty stretches of day while Jessie's at work and I
don't feel like I can be productive at a jobsearch. 

I got Master of Orion 3 when it arrived, as well, but it was a huge disappointment. I like empire-building, but I hate political games, and MoO3 took all the empire-building factors in MoO2 and stuffed them behind a wall
of AI, and took all the political stuff that had been secondary to the previous game and made them the focus, which meant that everything I enjoyed I couldn't do, and everything I found tedious was now the point. It's the
first PC game I've ever returned out of disgust. Not the first game ever, to be sure; that was Legend of Mana. I think honestly I disliked this even more than that.

I keep saying I have things I should be doing. I could be dilating. I could be writing. I could be out walkies. I could be managing my free time in some sort of useful fashion, but I never have. When I've got sixty things I
must do, not only do I get them all done but I manage to squeeze in ten things I want to do in the same time because I turn into a blizzard of productivity, and I can keep that up indefinitely; I did for three years at the end of my stint in college. When I've got nothing I have to do, or only one or two things, they never get done because I turn into a perpetual procrastinator. "I've got all the time in the world to work on it" because my excuse for everything, and then nothing ever gets done. The stuff I should be doing gets delayed because I don't feel like doing it right now and I know I can do it later. The stuff I want to be doing I feel guilty doing because I have things I should be doing that hang over me, but never get finished.

I'm a horrible time-manager, and I recognize it, but I'm never sure how to fix it shy of just doing things, and that doesn't happen, even though it should. I'm such a joyful bundle of neuroses. It's a wonder I'm not in a Happy Coat somewhere singing to my socks.

So, igneous compounds have been observed in a localized occurance of sanguination. More succinctly, the rock bled.

After all the brou-ha-ha I committed about the Evils of LiveJournal and other such neo-Luddite exhortations against my friends, to suddenly be in possession of one seems absurd. Then again, I have an account on FurryMUCK and an AIM account, too, now, and two years ago I was still railing against both of those.

I've said before that I'm not an early adopter, but by now one might think that I'd at least learn from my mistakes. I commented to Joanne on IRC earlier tonight that I'm not "happy" with having gotten an account, but at the same time I'm tired of fighting the March of Progress. I'm also still somewhat embarrassed about having had such a harangue with Jessie over the whole issues, too. To be sure, if Jessie hadn't goofed in a technical aspect of posting something private, I probably still wouldn't have an account, but I blew the situation way out of proportion to the actual issue.

This is now, I think, the third time I've said I had no use for something, only to end up in possession of it a few days later.

The part that makes me laugh, though, is the fact that now that I have all of these things, the call to actually use them has all but vanished. I haven't been on FM or AIM in months. Nobody seems to have noticed, or if they have they haven't bothered to contact me by any of the known reliable media and ask where I've been. I wonder if this, too, will end up being another in a long line of pan-flashes for me. It is said that Albert Einstein once had a friend buy him a can of shaving cream, which he found infinitely preferable to the ordinary soap he had been using to shave. When the can ran dry, he went back to soap, either never remembering or never caring enough to continue using the invention that he had hailed as such a blessing. Inertia won out over innovation.

It will be interesting to see how long this lasts.

---

In other news, I finally have a road-worthy vehicle again, so sayeth the mechanics to whom I took the car. This removes one of the two big things that went wrong on January 8, and means I have a much better chance of correcting the second with ease.

It also means, friends and neighbors, that the planning for the Bash can continue. In fact, the city, airport and dates are already selected, but we need now to drive up to the area and select the best hotel for the job, then get a contract. For that, I fully intend to call in SR, who was invaluable in assembling last year's Bash, 'cause I sure as heck can't read legalese. I click through all my EULAs without reading them on the grounds they're all immoral if not illegal and thus aren't binding. This will probably get me in trouble one day.

For those of you who feel like starting your plans, the Bash this year will be in Allentown, which is about two hours' drive north of Philadelphia, so chosen because the only thing within the vicinity of PHL proper is a Sunoco
refinery and some highway leading into Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. This is not the most scenic part of town. Most Bashers, as a rule, are poor. The ones that aren't are tight with money so as to avoid being poor,
and thus I figure the extra money spent on trying to fly into a smaller airport will more than be saved in car rental and gasoline fees for the people who will be flying to the event. The rest of you, you'll be driving anyway, so it's not even an extra tank of gas difference.

To those of you planning on attending, my apologies at the lateness of the date and the lack of plans so far. Given everything that's already happened this year, I hope you can forgive me when I say "I had other crises to handle first." See you all in three months!

Consider the following scenario:

An overweight woman and her husband walk into a trendy clothiers, and she goes into the back to try on some slinky outfit that she knows is at least a size too small. She comes out of the dressing room looking squeezed and
pinched into something that's blatantly too tight, and asks her husband sitting on the couch, "Does this dress make me look fat?"

We laugh, but there's an important effect at work here. The woman is not seeking an answer to the question. She's seeking reassurance. She has to know that the dress doesn't fit, that her hips and stomach bulge from beneath the fabric like great globs of pork-fat wrapped in cellophane. She can't possibly be blind to the fact that it emphasizes every curve she shouldn't have and doesn't do anything for the ones that she should. What she wants is not to be told whether or not the dress makes her look fat, because it does. What she wants is to be told that, in her husband's eyes she is beautiful.

However, therein lies the Great Paradox. If she asks to be told that she's beautiful, the compliment is meaningless. Having requested praise, receiving it counts for nothing. You got what you asked to be given, and that doesn't
satiate the need for approval. For it to truly be what she wants, it must be unrequested, unexpected. Not undeserved or unnecessary, to be sure, but it must be spontaneous. The husband must say, "Honey, you look great" without ever having been asked for such a statement, because to ask for it is to invalidate the answer.

I am that woman. My life is the dress.

I have this need, this raw craving for real that lurks within my skull like a demon. I can tell you in the abstract what I want. I can discuss generalities, possibilities, and probabilities until my tongue is numb. Until someone asks me for detail, or expresses an interest, that's the most I can say. Anything more, and I've ruined the spell.

If I tell you what I want without you asking me, it doesn't mean anything to me when you give it to me, because you aren't responding to my wishes; you're only cranking the handle on the rote-response generator. You don't really know what I want; you're only responding to my input, like a machine. You aren't real; you're just a mirror, showing me what I want to see. I don't want to see myself in your mirror. I want to see you.

Scenario Number Two:

Your friend holds a party. He says it's invite-only. You've got some vague and tenuous plans for that weekend, but nothing certain. You say as much. Your friend asks you if you want an invitation. You beg off, because of
those plans. Your friend shrugs and goes on his merry way. All next week, you hear everyone you know talking about the party, and how you should've been there. If you'd taken the invite when it was offered, then you'd have
felt like you invited yourself and really weren't part of the crowd, and you really did have other plans, even if they were sketchy. If you'd gotten an invite in the mail like all the other guests, though, you'd have gone, because then you'd have known that your friend really did want you there, and the invite would've felt genuine.

Is it psychosis? Probably. Is it neurosis? Certainly. Is it broken? Yes. Is it confusing? Likely. Is it curable? Doubtful.

I need to feel like I belong. Even as I scream my individuality to the heavens, I need to know that I'm an accepted member of my group. It's worse than the dress. It's the party. Even if you ask me if I want something, I'm not likely to say yes because some part of my skull will rise up an insist that you're only asking me because I've made a nuisance of myself, like all the other people I know that have asked to be let into private affairs. Even to my own mind, I'm no better than the little fat kid standing outside the cool kids' clubhouse asking to be let inside, or worse, making a big show of how much I don't want to be a part of any ol' stupid club, all the while hungrily peeking through the windows, trying not to get caught.

When I receive a compliment without solicitation from a stranger praising one of my stories, it's the most incredible high in the world. Why can't I feel that when someone dear to me offers me something? Why must I reject it? Why can't I believe in its reality? Why does my brain mandate such an important difference between being offered something, and being given that same thing outright?

I guess it goes back to the dress. If the wife walks out and the husband says, "Would you like me to compliment you?" in response to her solitication of opinion, she'd be insulted. She'd probably be even more insulted than if he had told her that she could stand to lose a few pounds. He's taken what should have been an unwritten subtext and made it blatant, and in so doing he's exposed the absurdity of the whole scenario. She wants to know that she's beautiful in his eyes. She wants the unrequested reassurance that he finds her attractive despite her size, and so she deliberately calls her weight into issue by trying on a dress that's too tight and asking if it makes her look bad. She has to know, at least subconsciously, that her actions are childish, but to confess that is to admit her weakness, to acknowledge her lack of self-esteem. What she wants is to win without admitting that she's
playing the game. Asking if she wants to be told how good she looks is bringing the game into the focus, kind of like asking a D&D character for zir alignment.

I can go one better than she can. I can admit that the game exists. I can even admit in the abstract that I play it, even knowing that it can't be won. I'm not proud of that truth, but I think I can take some pride in the admission. I may not be emotionally healthy, but I'm cognizant of my damage and try to take steps to correct it when I can and work around it when I can't.

Nobody stays in Atlantis by faking reality in any manner whatsoever.

I suppose technically that this should be March 5th, but I'm writing it on the extreme morning of the fifth after having gotten up some time on the afternoon of the fourth, so I'm calling it the 4th for technicality's sake. To be fair, some of my Thailand entries are properly labelled and I wrote them at all hours of the day, but the entries I wrote while in Thailand don't match up to anything normal, sane or reasonable. That whole trip is one big bucket of surreal in my head, a symbol that contains no inherent meaning and thus is reinterpreted every time I think about it.

I think what shocks me most about Thailand, even to this day, is the way it lingers in my mind. It wasn't a happy trip. It wasn't a frightening trip. It wasn't a surreal trip. I visited Chloe, XoYo and Mut. I had three major and
two minor surgical procedures. I endured two bouts of food poisoning. I learned to love pad thai. I discovered the 1950s-era-science-reel joy of dilation. I reinvented who I am. I discovered that I'm just like who I used to be, only moreso. It's not that Thailand could have been only yesterday; it's that Thailand could be tomorrow.

The last month has been incredibly stressful for me. Finding a job in this economy has been... well, to say difficult is an understatement and to say it's been hell is a hyperbole. The truth is that all of my work seems to vanish into a black hole of Human Resources drones and technical recruiters who themselves aren't technical people. I had a recruiter tell me "I don't see UNIX on your résumé" when I had listed Solaris, AIX, OSF1, HP-UX, and SCO instead. I've been accused of job-hopping in my efforts to stay ahead of the lay-off curve. I've been told that my years of experience in coding don't count for anything because I'm too specialized. I've been told they don't count because I'm not specialized enough. I don't know how to make my chances of success more, or even less, likely, short of yelling at a recruiter and accusing her of pigeonholing me because of my attempts to avoid being let go by one company or another that's suffered trouble, reinvented itself and discovered it didn't need me or otherwise
found out after hiring me that I wasn't the right candidate for the job. Not that I would do such a thing, of course.

In short, I've hit a sort of use-the-Force requirement. I can no longer plan for my own future, because I don't feel like I'm in control of it, at least not right now. It's horrifyingly liberating, and sadistically enlightening. I'm not reacting at all well to the feeling that I can't provide for those about whom I care, and every day I realize just how much of my personality is tied up in the belief that my value unto others is determined by my ability to provide for them, in some fashion or another. It's a very dangerous belief, one I'm trying to excise from my mind. In the absense of obviously positive cashflow, though, it's very hard to overcome.

Jessie and I finally had to ask Shay to leave. Her last day under our roof will be the fifteenth of this month. I don't want and don't need to go into all the reasons she's leaving, but it's been gnawing at me. I feel like I've failed, though how I couldn't say. Worse, there's a part of me that feels used, even though I know she never intended for that to happen. I gave her six months in Texas. I gave her six weeks when she came to Philly. I gave her a month this time. Every time, she's managed somehow to wear out her welcome by the end of it. Not that she's chosen to leave, but that we've had to ask her to vacate our premises. Part of me wonders why I keep sticking my head in the bandsaw. Part of me can't figure out why she doesn't turn the bandsaw off. Part of me relishes the pain as long as the bandsaw-operator is laughing while she calls 911.

I've been yelling at Jessie a lot lately. The stress is obviously getting to me, but never in ways that seem obvious. Little things that I can take in stride as long as the lights are on come back to gnaw at me when I close my eyes. Jessie locked a LiveJournal post to friends only recently, and I don't have a LiveJournal so I couldn't see it. I knew it was there 'cause I saw Jessie writing it, but it didn't show up in the listing, and I had a conniption because I wanted to know how many other posts I might have been missing along the way and never known I'd missed, just because I didn't have a LiveJournal account, to say nothing of all the other problems I've had with LiveJournal, et alia, in the past.

Those of you who would respond to this by saying, "why don't you just get a LiveJournal account" have not done
your homework. C-minuses for the lot of you. See me after class.

I wish I knew what was wrong with me. I wish I knew how to make it stop. I wish I at least knew when I would have the resources again to make these things go away. I was never like this when I had a job, or was I? Was I
always this petty, this antagonistic, this bitchy-without-just-cause, and I just had enough material comfort and security to patch over the jagged edges of my personality?

Most psych-types that I know have said to me that losing one's job is the second-largest possible cause of stress in one's life, just behind a death in the family. It's a loss of self-sufficiency, and more. It's a loss of self-esteem, of self-respect. I'm sucking on the government tit and hating it, and hating myself for having to do it.

Maybe I should go work at a coffee-bar or something, for the extra cash. I won't lose any benefits until I'm making forty percent of my unemployment check in earned income, and considering what I was making before I doubt I could make that much at a part-time job. Of course, by the same token, taking a job like that while I'm still receiving benefits feels like I'm giving up hope of finding a better job. I joke about becoming a truck driver if I can't find a tech job, but that, too, is giving up. It's just giving up in a different way.

I wish I had a job. I wish I felt like I had the ability to just go get one. Right now, I feel like it's all in the hands of Fate, and Fate is not a master I trust.

---

I feel the need to add this as a post-script, though I know I shouldn't have to say it. I said above that I've been yelling at Jessie. What I didn't say there is how much it tears me up inside when I do. I don't think I could put
into words just how much Jessie means to me. Every time I lose my temper, I feel sick to my stomach. My breath gets short. My paws go numb, even worse now that I've damaged the nerves in my right one. I lash out, and then I want to curl up in a ball and cry because I've hurt someone that means as much to me as my own life. I feel that much worse after having lost control of myself with Jessie, worse than I ever would if I had just blown up at a friend, or even a lover. It's the closest I can get to screaming at myself in a mirror without a reflective surface.

I know I've wished to undo the past before, to change steps I'd taken and do things differently. I know how foolish those wishes are, how they seek to uncreate the person I am today. Never do I wish for that ability so strongly as when I get angry with my mate, in spite of all that. I hope this makes sense.

So. First, I've lost my job. Second, I've lost my car. Third... well, there isn't really a third to that, but the first two are enough. I suppose getting the flu could be the third, but it only makes me feel like diving head-first off of an overpass above the Schuylkill, or however the hell that river's name is spelled. Spelt. Whatever. It really isn't a life-changing event. That's okay, though, because between my means of getting from point A to point B vanishing and my means of acquiring a new means of getting from point A to point B vanishing, I've had it pretty rough.

Actually, there are a few other points, call them 3A, 3B and so on. They're not really "life-changing" but they're pretty nasty. I think I've come down with cubital tunnel syndrome. The ring and pinky fingers on my right paw have been tingling non-stop for the last five days now, and they refuse to relax. About a week ago, I picked up Arcanum, which is this older game for which I finally got a fast enough computer to run, and I treated myself to a few marathon sessions of this new addiction. Only, I hadn't really accounted for the fact that my trackball had died, and I had just gone back to a mouse, and I have this really old wooden-armed chair that my father
made that cuts off the circulation in my hands when I rest my elbows against it for too long. Well, sure enough, after three days of non-stop steampunk action à la Castle Falkenstein, two of my fingers went numb,
and every time I pick up the mouse in that paw, they start to tingle more fiercely, like a dowsing rod for bad ideas. I've tried to keep my arm locked straight as all of the self-help guides have suggested, but that doesn't
seem to do much more than cut off the blood-flow to the other  fingers on that paw, so I've kind of given up caring.

There is a medical solution, of course. Cortisone shots, and outpatient surgery if those don't work. However, point 3B is that my medical insurance is gone. You see, this goes back to the fact that my last company is the
entrepreneurial equivalent of an old man dottering about in his garage. The president is a woman to take advantage of the tax break. The owner is the Vice President of Emerging Business, which is a fancy title that seems to mean "is a personal friend to two-thirds of the customer base." The kicker, of course, is that the company never has more than fifteen people in it, because then they'd have to follow all the rules that apply
to small businesses but aren't aimed at two-guys-in-a-garage. So, no COBRA. My manager was magnanimous enough to offer to let me cover the premiums out of pocket and just not list me as no longer employed for health purposes, but I can't afford USD676 for two months of health insurance when my total monthly income comes to USD1700 right now, ten percent of which is taxed because it qualifies as income. Thank whatever deities may exist that I already budgeted for the full cost of hormones, because if I hadn't someone would've needed an ambulance when my drugs ran out. I just hope that person would've been insured, or we'd all be in trouble.

Finally, 3C, I have two new boarders living under my roof. Now, in a perverse sort of fashion, this is a good thing, because Kelly and Shay are paying a portion of the rent, which means my unemployment checks are going further than they would otherwise. However, living in a two-bedroom apartment was cozy with two people, and with three it was crowded. Now there're four of us, and it's packed. If I had a job, I could offer to co-sign on a place, but I don't. If Shay didn't have an eviction on her record, she could co-sign, but she can't. If Kelly were working two jobs, she'd make enough by herself to pay for a place in the eyes of the complexes around here, but she's already getting stretched at the seams working the one she's got. Right now, none of us really
know how to get out of this mess, but in the meantime, hey, cheap livin'.

It's this amazing clusterfuck of a situation. I'm looking for work, but right now the tech market is TEH FU><0R, and half of my friends are either unable to get tech jobs or are massively underpaid and overworked. I'm trying to avoid the mindset of "I'll ride out my unemployment, then go be a truck driver," but it's a pretty tempting proposition. I've always hated the tech sector; I got into it because I knew I was good at it, not because I liked it. I can't afford to go back to school unless I want to plan on a bankruptcy in my future, which one of my other long-term friends is doing. I've got too much experience and education to be a fresh-out-of-college entry level trainee, but not enough to be the God Of Computing that every place now seems to want because they all know the tech market is TEH FU><0R and they can demand godhood and get it if they wait long enough.

On the other note, the car that Tanya brought me to replace the one I exploded failed its state safety inspection, which is going to make life really fun for a lot of people. I don't have the money to make the repairs it needs. If I'd had the money to repair it, I'd have gone to a dealer and bought a real used car that was already inspected. Instead, I cashed out Tanya's debt on the promise that she'd bring me a car to replace the one I destroyed. The car she brought me isn't street-legal, so now I'm even more screwed than I was before. If push really comes down to shove, I can put the repairs for the car on one of my credit cards and just plan on adding four or five months to the time it takes me to pay off my bills, but that's really not how I wanted to have to handle the situation; see above for why.

I hate living in a holding pattern.

Now that it's behind me, I think I can safely say that yesterday has to be the single worst day in conscious memory.

For starters, I lost my job, the shiny new one I just got two months ago that promised to be actual work instead of sitting at a computer playing Freecell and waiting for the axe to fall. It was a great idea, and everyone involved
thought it was a good move, at least at first. Then I discovered something about my new workplace's development cycle: they don't have one. Instead, they use a time-honored system for creating programs called Write A Quick Hack And Make It A Design Philosophy. In the two months I was there, we expanded from two products to six, and none of them were done right, well, or completely before the code was in production and being used by at least one client, often more.

Now, I like to think that in times of great need and obvious duress, I can whip out code to order that'll serve in a pinch until something better can be written. However, I tend very much to be a code-to-the-spec type of person,
and trying to get anything accomplished in that environment led very quickly to a lot of stress and frustration. After two months, management decided that I just wasn't adapting and they let me go. It's hard to complain too much;
they admitted their environment wasn't conducive to good coding standards or good work, and they also recognized that my programming ability was superb. It was just far slower and regimented than they wanted, and so they cut their losses while they could.

So, on my way home after thirty minutes of managerial meeting and cleaning out my desk in a hurry, my car died. Now, this one I have to say is my fault. I'd been putting off getting an oil change, 'cause mine's the only car for
Jessie and I and we both work non-traditional schedules, so getting the car in and out unless it's some quicky-lube place is kind of a pain, and I could never bother with finding one of those that was open on Sunday. So, the oil got really low. As in, the light sputtered a few times, then in the last few days of the car's earthly existence stayed red. Now, I'd already blown up one car by not heeding the warning lights on my dash, but again I really had no "good time" to go handle the vehicle fix. As I was driving home from the last day at work, I decided that the time had come to get the oil fixed 'cause I'd have the time to do it in the middle of the day, and that's when the car started making this really rhythmic clicking sound.

Now, anybody who knows anything about cars, even me, should know that as soon as something like that starts up under the bonnet, the car is dead. It's now officially a zombie. It could die in a month. It could die in two years. It could survive indefinitely on the gasoline, oil and transmission fluids of other vehicles, sucking them dry to sustain its own unnatural existence. It's a '94 Ford Escort with 157,000 miles on it, for Dobbs' sake. It should've
died long back, but it hadn't. Well, now it did. It's still driveable, but I now can't trust it not to roll over at any random moment, and so at the first possible opportunity, I'm going to have to replace it.

This is hampered by Event Number One. See above.

Now, I do have the means to replace the car. I've got about six thousand dollars in the bank, saved up to be the down payment on the house that I've been trying to buy for the last three months. Unfortunately, if I spend that on a new car, I won't have it for the house. If I don't spend it on a car, though, my ability to get a new job becomes somewhat hampered. If I can't get a new job, we're sunk. Not immediately, to be sure. I should get unemployment benefits, and they'll cover me for a while. Not as nicely as I'd like, but that's because they're a government handout, not a job.

For now, I'm just trying to find another job as quickly as possible, and hope that the car doesn't realize it's already dead and fall-over-boom before I can replace it.

I think I'm going to have to take a vow of silence regarding any issue involving my personal opinions. My fastest mechanism possible for alienating even the people I love and who love me in return seems to be voicing my viewpoint.

The above statement is characteristic of the reasons why the above statement is true. I am a writer. I am not an orator. When I put down prose, I have the time to edit it in successive iterations, refining and improving my language at every pass. The first draft of most of what I write is, by my own view, poorly written. Speech involving another human being is nothing but first drafts.

The best example of this I can give is, I think, the movie Pee Wee's Big Adventure. This movie is, in my honest opinion, an exceptionally artistic film. It shows us the world as seen by an eight-year-old, and it accomplishes
this exceptionally well. However, it uses the character of Pee-Wee Herman, as portrayed by Paul Reubens, to do this, and Pee-Wee Herman gives me the itch. I don't enjoy watching that character, and yet I can think of no other lead role that would have worked anywhere nearly as well, nor could I imagine anyone else in that role. In addition, my eight-year-old world was a painful and uncomfortable place. Thus, while I think the film is brilliant in its execution, it's one I actively do not enjoy watching and have no desire to ever see again.

All of the above sentiment came out as "That film sucked" when Jessie asked me what I thought of it after I watched it. I could barely sit through the movie, I felt I had been pressured into viewing it, I didn't enjoy being
brought back to my own childhood by proxy, and I had to fight down my own bile at that buzz-cutted, bow-tied buffoon's antics on the screen. My initial response was, I hope, understandably visceral, but my method of conveying what I felt came out horribly oversimplified and heavily misleading. The film does not, in fact, suck in my opinion, but the experience of watching it was such that when questioned on my current state of mind, I gave a purely emotional response.

This did not lead to a positive dialogue afterwards. In fact, it led to an argument which didn't resolve itself for days. In true-to-self fashion, when Jessie responded to my emotional expulsion with frustration and disbelief, I
took it as a sign of invalidation and became defensive, leading me to lash out at my mate, who in turn became cold and isolating. Seeing this, I shut down emotionally realizing I had hurt someone I loved, and only then
was I able to say in clear terms how I truly felt about the film, at which point it became evident to all involved that there had been no conflict from the beginning, if only I could've said "this is why I didn't like it" instead of "this sucked."

Unfortunately, as I said above, I am a writer, not an orator. I almost never say what I want to say the first time I open my muzzle, and yet I'm expected consistently to be as good with my words in real-time as I am on the page, and when I fail to live up to the standards my written works have set for me, I confuse and upset those around me. I upset and confuse myself, as well, because often I won't have even been able to sort out what it is that I'm trying to say. I have only an emotion, and I don't understand it; I have no way of explaining it to other people yet, because I don't know what's caused it in myself.

This leads me to my next problem. Not only can I not easily explain what's wrong when I first have to do so, I'm very defensive of my emotions. I've had too often the sense of being told I'm in the wrong for how I think when
I try to voice my specific views on a subject. Much of this, I'm sure, can be blamed on my ex, but that doesn't mean I should do it. Still, there's a part of me that feels that if I break down my dislikes or likes into specifics,
someone will pick them apart or tear them down, but if I present only "I liked it" or "I didn't like it," there's nothing to attack.

All of this, I'm sure, could be forgiven if I didn't feel the need to vent my spleen when I'm upset, as part of the process of working out why I'm upset and getting over things. I bring most of my problems down on my own head, by trying to talk about what bothers me and failing miserably to convey any sort of coherent meaning, leading those around me to look at me in bewilderment because I'm not normally the sort to just go off half-cocked. I have a reason for almost everything I say, but often until I've worked through whatever it is
that's on my mind, I'm incapable of conveying it in a meaningful fashion. 

It's a challenge to myself, sometimes, figuring out what actually bothers me. Often I have to make several iterations through my own head, thinking that one thing is the problem and finding out through analysis that that's not really what it is, but that something is still bothering me. Usually, once I know why I'm upset, I stop being upset about it. It's either the worst case of self-delusion or the best case of self-understanding. Either way, the pain goes away.

In the meantime, though, I inflict my particular brand of insanity on those around me, who either have the option of trying to respond to my neurosis and risk upsetting me further, or trying somehow to ignore me while I spin madly like an out-of-control whirligig until I sputter to a halt. In the meantime, I say the craziest things in an attempt to figure out what my true feelings on an issue are, and may irk any number of people in the process. I'm prone to saying things that I don't truly believe but that at the moment I say them are less painful to accept as true than admitting a mistake. In general, I'm a royal bitch.

This apparently makes me no different from any other woman.

Since I never speak of this sort of thing in the abstract, obviously there must be something that prompted all of this. Of course, there is. One member of my surrogate family made a comment in her LiveJournal about the death of story in modern gaming, which led to a long and involved argument between my mate and I about whether this was a valid statement, whether it was a true statement, and whether it was an important statement. This branched out into what constituted a good game, and ultimately whether or not my view of gaming was meaningful in the scope of the industry as a whole. As I could care less about any "view of the group as a whole" except for how it impacts my own ability to function and enjoy myself, the conversation degenerated rapidly, leading to my state of upset.

I talked with Galen about this lately, but it's something that weighs heavily on my mind. I suffer from a pair of emotional needs that make engaging in any heavy discussion difficult. On the one hand, I actively fear being manipulated or used by those around me. On the other, I fear being isolated or alienated from my friends and family. This leads me at once to try to condemn what the majority of my friends do—even if it's something I want or enjoy—and to do my own thing—and to follow the herd—even if I don't like what they're doing—in turns. I want to be recognized and accepted as part of my social group, but I hate feeling like I'm doing things because the other members of my group are doing them.

This means that in conversation, adding to all of the above, I often try to stake out my position and stick by it, but it means that I feel the incessant need for my view to be validated by those whose opinions are meaningful to me,
even when they don't understand me or when I say things in my muddled way. When I don't get what I need, I get even more frustrated because I feel like I'm being ignored or treated poorly by the people I'm supposed to be able to trust, and that just accelerates the descent into madness.

Some days, it's a wonder that I have any friends at all any more. That makes the ones who are willing to put up with my insanity that much more precious.

I think I finally had the talk with Anji that I needed to have. That we both needed to have. This happened with my friend Mitchell, and I should've seen the signs. People change. It's a fact of life. People grow and mature and evolve throughout their lives, and when you're around people a lot, you see how they change, and you change with them, and you learn over time how to adjust how you deal with those people to accomodate those changes. When you're around someone for a long time, you develop a lot of subtle specialties that key you into how that person feels and thinks, and those too change over time, but you see how they change. Then, if suddenly you're not around that person for a long time, you both keep changing, but you do so in isolation from each other, and those cues change, but you don't see it happening and so when you meet back up with that person, you don't account for the differences and suddenly there's tears and anger and misunderstandings and hurt. We both finally admitted that had happened, and I think we're the better for it.

Mind you, it doesn't explain what to do next, but it tells us where we are and how we got here, and what we'd at least like to see happen from here.

One odd side effect of this talk, however, is that it's left me in this really weird mood, and listening to Bush's "Alien" hasn't helped at all. I feel suffused with this very powerful violence or passion suffused into a fierce protectiveness. It's this sense that I care for someone so much that I would kill to protect that person, without hesitation or regret. Mixed into it is a guilt and fear of this capacity within myself, like I don't quite know or
understand how it got into my head but that I know it won't ever go away. Perhaps I've heavily overanalyzing it, but it's one of the few emotions in my head that, for whatever reason, gets heavily associated with "male," despite the fact that there's no creature so ferocious as a dam bear whose cubs are threatened.

I was catching myself up on my youngest sister's livejournal, and I found where she had referenced me as "den mother," which only adds to the sensation. Is that what I'm feeling? Does it really matter? I know that I get this way from time to time; it's one of the few holdovers from my previous life that I think actively belongs in my head, but I still don't really know where it fits.

I think if I totally understood how I felt, I'd be criminally insane. I think if anyone else ever totally understood how I felt, I'd be forced to kill zim for my own salvation's sake.

Thanksgiving is supposed to be the holiday on which we give thanks—hence its name—to that which makes our lives better. In that sense, I can get a heck of a lot more into Thanksgiving than I can into Christmas, or most any
other holiday. I like the idea of celebrating people's birthdays, as a sign of respect, but that's not really large-scale holiday fodder. The only other days I could see celebrating would be Labor Day and Independence Day, but the former implies "relaxing" which means no working on party-type things, and the latter I can't really dig, 'cause while I love the ideals upon which my nation were founded, I have a hard time appreciating the current incarnation of those visions. It's a damn sight better than most, to be sure, but I still think we could do a lot better. A grass-is-greener problem, maybe.

Right now, I have a lot for which to be thankful. ObTrannie, I'm thankful that the surgery is now well and truly behind me and that I can enjoy the results. I'm thankful to have such a loving and supporting mate who was willing to keep zir paws to zirself while I was still healing but who is now more than willing to put zir paws all over me. I'm thankful to still be employed after the economic meltdown. I'm thankful to still be in sufficient possession of my faculties as to not need to wear the Happy Coat more than once a week, so long as I take my pills like a good girl. I'm thankful to have family and friends with whom to spend the holidays. All in all, my life's pretty good
right now.

To be sure, there are a few dark clouds. I almost had to work last Friday, which would've sucked because it would've cut into my four-day weekend right down the middle. Fortunately, for some definition of fortunate, I had worked four hours a day over the weekend prior and managed to get everything that had to be done for today finished, so nobody complained when I said I would be back on Monday and not Friday. Most of upper management was out of the office as well, so nothing really happened on Friday anyway.

Thanksgiving itself went off remarkably well. A friend of mine from Virginia visited, and my sister Joanne made it all the way from Ohio for the four-day weekend. Tanya came down from Jersey, and Randy and her girlfriend put in an appearance on Thursday. Thanks to a slight communication goof, Tanya and I both bought turkeys, so we ended up with over thirty pounds of roast bird for the occasion, plus a ham, homemade stuffing, mashed potatoes, rolls and egg nog.

Here I must digress briefly and discuss egg nog. I have a great fondness for this concoction, and I have since my youth, but it is horribly unhealthy in its standard form, and with me being on a low-carb diet it's even worse for
me. However, having found a recipe online with which I can work, I did some tweaking and adjustments, and I devised an Atkins-compliant Egg Nog:

• 1 qt heavy cream
• 1 qt half-and-half
• 6 egg yolks
• 2 egg whites
• 1 C Splenda
• 1.25 C brandy
• 0.5 t nutmeg
• 0.5 t cinnamon

1. In a mixing bowl, combine yolks with Splenda, whip until thoroughly mixed.
2. Add brandy and half-and-half, whip until evenly mixed.
3. In a blender, combine egg whites with cream, blend on high until well-aerated.
4. Fold heavy cream mixture into half-and-half mixture, stir well
5. Blend in spices

The total "bad carb" count is thirty-two grams for over two quarts of egg nog, which is a hell of a lot less than most traditional varieties. There's carbs in the brandy, to be sure, but sugar alcohol doesn't get converted into fat, or so goes the theory, so it's "safe". Next I'm going to replace the half-and-half with more heavy cream, but that may make the result too thick, if such a thing is possible.

Anyway, the gathering itself I think went very well. I make a very poor hostess, in my opinion: I love to have people over, but I have no idea how to keep that many people entertained. I can barely keep myself and my mate
occupied most evenings, unless we've gotten a new video game, so having eight people just magnified the problem. I think most nights passed in front of Metroid Prime or Super Smash Brothers Melee, much to my embarrassment. Still, nobody complained too heavily about anything, so I hope people weren't too bored and just not telling me.

All in all, I think Thanksgiving went well. This means I have a year to plan for how to do it better.

---

The other major issue on my mind right now is housing. I decided some time ago that I wanted out of the rent trap, and I'm now in an area of the country in which I could easily see myself settling, at least until retirement, and
so I've started the long and arduous task of finding a house. Of course, with the economy in this slump, interest rates are down, and so everyone else is also looking for a house, and most of them have their finances directly in
order to buy the instant they find something.

So far, I've had four houses sniped out from under me. By that, I mean I see some place that looks nice, tell the realtor with whom I've been working that I'd like to schedule a viewing, and then find out that it's not available in
the time that it takes her to get something scheduled. The fifth place at which I wanted to look turned out to be in such poor shape that it didn't have active power or other utilities, so right now I'm kind of bummed. I know I
have some strict requirements, like a second full bathroom, but there can't be that many people looking at the same thing, can there?

At least my down payment is growing nicely. I got my vacation pay from my old job, very unexpectedly, which added to the stocks I sold very nicely and made up about $2500. December is a three-check month, so I'll be able to add another $700 to that in two weeks, and then my 401K from my old job will cash itself out soon, which should be another good chunk of change. Hopefully by the time the bank tells me I can get prequalified, I'll have enough dosh to pass their tests.

After that, I just have to find a house.