0004 Byetera 12: Personal Words

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.

0003 Lakera 12: Twenty-five

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:

1. 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."
2. I wrote Chuckles in the Wind when I was eight.
3. 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.
4. In what should've been a warning sign for the future, my first two spoken words were "no" and "up", in that order.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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."
11. 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?
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. 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.
19. 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?"
20. 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.
21. 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.
22. 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.
23. 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.
24. 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.
25. 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."

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.

I like to think that I'm making progress towards being emotionally mature. Not "grown-up" necessarily, because that implies a great many things about accepting the world as it is and denying how the world could and should be, but capable of meaningful interactions with others and an understanding of when people matter and when they don't. Every once in a while, though, things happen that show me how far I really have yet to go to actually be where I think I want to be.

For those of you who play City of Heroes or who have played some other MMORPG, you'll probably recognize the scenario, if not the specifics. For the rest, here's a quick primer. The character on which I'm currently focused on the game is a Tanker. He's built not to do a lot of damage, but to take a lot of punishment while teammates round up and defeat enemies. He's also my badge-collecting character, which means that there are a lot of game-specific events that I'm trying to get him to do, and some number of these involve player-versus-player combat. Now, I've talked about PvP before and its negative impact on my psyche. I suppose given that I could have said that I just wasn't going to get those badges, but then I really wouldn't have been a badge-collector, now would I? So, I gritted my teeth and took my Tanker into Bloody Bay, expecting the worst.

What I discovered was... odd. He's not good for PvP, to be sure. He's got a lousy hit rate and, comparatively, he does very little damage to opponents. What he has going for him, though, is the fact that he's incredibly hard to kill. That is to say, I was drawing groups of three enemies at a time to a stalemate and fending off groups of four with inspirations. At one point, I was in the "one" in a five-on-one and still survived for over a minute of dedicated pounding. I had villains actively swearing at me and accusing me of cheating because they just weren't doing anything.

Now, another important thing to know about Santorini, the aforementioned tanker, is that he's unofficially my "snark" character. He's the one through whom I express my black-humour gene, that part of my personality that finds Heathers hilarious and empathises with Beetlejuice when he says he's seen the Exorcist a hundred-and-sixty-seven times and it just kept getting funnier. Part of the character of Santorini is this cheerfully dark personality that laughs at the absurd and isn't afraid to call it for what it is. So, when beating off clusters of badguys to a standstill, I'm prone to make wisecracks about the effectiveness of their attacks, the battery life of their laser guns, the cheapness of their special effects, and so on. However, it's always about the characters, not the players. I'm always very careful to make sure that I'm in character.

How quickly and easily I forget that most people don't have characters. Just because I enjoy role-playing and treat Santorini as one of many roles I can adopt in the world of Paragon City, that doesn't mean that any random stranger I meet in-game is going to either understand this or care. So, I'm afraid that in playing the part of a smartassed hero-type, I inadvertently pissed off a great many players who thought I was making fun of them. That in and of itself could probably have been resolved amicably, or at least with minimal altercation. I'm never ashamed to say that I screwed up, even if sometimes it takes me a while to admit it. I'm not perfect, but I at least try to be mindful of my actions.

So, established first is that I'm playing somebody with a big mouth, and I'm probably pushing buttons on people without really thinking about it because to me, at that time, "it's all just a game". I'm not out to hurt anyone's feelings, but I am "in character", something that I don't really realize consciously that most people don't do.

Second, there exists in City of Villains a character class that's basically an assassin. There's also a teleport power that lets you move very quickly and essentially tracelessly. For those of you in the know, the new fashionable build for Stalkers is "Assassin's Strike + Teleport". Hide at the base, run out looking for a hero in the middle of some other fight, wait until zie's at half hit points, AS your target and then teleport out of danger. If you're lucky, you one-shotted your opponent, get credit for a PvP kill despite doing no work, and stand almost no chance of getting hurt. If you're unlucky, you didn't kill your target and have to hope that your opponent can't one-shot you in return, but the odds of dying between the time you recover from your AS and the time your teleport activates is usually short enough that you make a clean getaway.

There were five of these people in Bloody Bay last night, and thanks to a combination of my big mouth and my teammates' general success at actually taking down villains, we became target number one. Not that the people on the server could really do anything to us, as noted, but the string of petty annoyances became almost continuous and a few times when we weren't looking for PvP and instead focused on wandering mobs, we got taken down by the stalkers who saw us as easy targets.

Finally, after a few hours of this nonsense, I finally broke character and called them on it. Over the broadcast channel, I actively questioned their tactics, told them they were acting spoiled, suggested that if they wanted to actually engage in PvP in any meaningful fashion that they should actually go and advance their characters until they didn't have to pull the cheap one-shot tricks to survive, and that it'd be more fun for everyone if they quit acting like children.

In retrospect, I probably should have kept my muzzle shut. They, seeing no difference between in and out of character, called me on being an arrogant bitch before and couldn't take the heat, blah blah blah. I tried very briefly to explain the idea of role-playing to a bunch of kiddies who just wanted to beat up on other people on the interwebs, then lost my cool. The snark went from being darkly amusing to outright cruel, and I think I publically humiliated a few of them. This did not earn me any Whuffie from the villain camp, though admittedly a few of the heroes did tell me I was doing a good job for actually calling out the kids on their bad behavior.

Then one of them called me emo, and I totally came unstitched. That wasn't the exact word he used, but the gist was on the order of "whiny brat sitting in mom's basement hunched over a computer crying for love". I put my best SubGenius BRAG on, told the kid exactly how and when he could get in touch with me out of game, and laughed about how great it would be to deliver all of the smack talk live instead of through the computer keyboard.

This was not my crowning moment. At least not for intellect or compassion. Monumental stupidity, perhaps. Certainly not forethought.

The fact that I gave out my work number is not at issue. A three-minute phone call to the ITA in the building can get that changed if it becomes a problem. Nobody's called me yet, and even if they do leave me voicemail I'll never get it because I don't have access to my work voicemail box, so they probably think my name is Jeff by now; he was the employee before me who had this extension and locked his voicemailbox, then lost the passcode. I'm not worried about creepy internet stalkers, aside from the kind in-game. I'm more worried about the fact that I let them work me into a frothy lather through a few well-placed jabs. It was as if, knowing that they could do very little to my character, they deliberately turned their assault against me personally, and I was so unprepared for this kind of assault that I fell instantly for their bait.

If anything it shows how easily the human brain, evolved from its primate roots but still possessed of many hindbrain characteristics, can be tricked into behavior patterns that are utterly alien to the dominant personality. That isn't the kind of person I want to be, and yet it took almost nothing but a few jabs to dissolve me to that level of crude interaction, this parody of communication. I quit trying to make sense and teach and expand other people's thoughts, and instead sought only to better myself at the expense of another human being.

Well, I say "human being". This plays directly back into my elitism, perhaps, but I want here and now to question whether or not these people are human. Not to say that they're better or worse, necessarily, but they're not my species. Not my subspecies, at any rate. Physically we may be capable of interbreeding, but culturally and emotionally we're two entirely different groups, if only because I know about my vulnerabilities and want to overcome them, and they neither know nor care about the exploits in their thoughtglands that drive them to such actions.

So, I guess in reference to my previously mentioned post, I suppose it's not that I hate PvP, so much as it's just interaction with Homo semisapiens that I dislike. They look like I do, walk like I do, and follow the same biological functions that I do, but the thoughts that power them are so foreign to my own that continued exposure is physically and emotionally unpleasant. Going out into the world often feels like entering a giant petting zoo, without any signs anywhere warning me that the inhabitants are dangerous when provoked.

I won't be getting the PvP badge any time soon, but hopefully tonight I'll get the time-in-zone badge for Bloody Bay and I can take Santorini out and actually get back to the fun parts of the game.

I miss my heart.

It's a new year, and despite a lot of emotional ups and downs so far, I have to say that I suspect this time around the sun will be far preferable to the one before. Not that I have any chance to go back and revisit the previous year in any meaningful fashion, mind you. Being of strictly three dimensions curved in four-dimensional space, I am limited to monodirectional motion through spacetime's w-axis. This at times seems like a real pity, because I bet I could finally roll over a Pac-Man machine if I went back to 1986 enough times.

Today is, of course, "Friday the thirteenth", which means exactly as much as you wish it to mean. I'm a big believer in make-your-own-magjickq. For the spelling of "magjickq", by the way, I have to blame a friend of mine who apparently got it from her girlfriend's polite teasing of the "schools" of "philosophy" that teach that any "will-to-power" "belief" system use an "alternate" spelling from the "authoritative" one found in the "dictionary" to separate it from mere parlour tricks and making David Copperfield "vanish". So, if consulting your horoscopes or reading your tea leaves or asking the nailbunny a question today means a genuine from-beyond-the-stars answer, do it! Make your own reality. Be or build your own sex goddess. Launch your own head!

Today's featured Wikipedia is on game theory. Game designers, take note! This will help tell you why Monopoly sucks and go is beautiful. I should probably spend a lot of time looking at this, too.

This was going to be a post on the general cluelessness of people on the internet, based on the fact that I received an e-mail that I thought at first was asking me for my e-mail address, and I was all prepared to rant about this at length, until I went back and reread it to confirm the exact message and found that the author wanted my "mailing address", which is not a stupid request at all since I'm trying to find out information about a class action lawsuit against one of the companies in which I'm invested. So, I suppose instead I should turn this into a post about always double-checking one's facts before saying or doing anything stupid like posting on about the general cluelessness of people on the internet.

The last couple of days have been a royal roller-coaster of emotion for many reasons, most of which boil down to "Kristy doesn't have her head screwed on right". I'd say I'm under a lot of stress, but the truth is that most of it is generated internally. I am probably my own single biggest source of angst and frustration, mostly because I have all these ideas and no followthrough on any of them. I've had projects languishing for weeks months years too long that really deserve some love and attention:

• Child of Man isn't dead, but it hasn't moved past chapter eleven since the last time I talked about it in public. I feel stuck on this one exchange that needs to be good because it's the point at which the transition happens from plot points being added to plot points being wrapped up. I'm at the turning point and starting the downslide into the climax, and I really need to make this next section happen well. Part of my problem, too, is that my writing in general has suffered because of the many times I've convinced myself that writing "just isn't appreciated in the fandom", a rant I've made before or at least supported in principle when other people have made it. I used to be able to tell myself I wrote for my own happiness. Once I was happy without needing to write, my output plummeted. It's very disappointing.
• Doomsday Lotto is still in search of an artist, and a finished site design. I know how I want it to look, but I haven't even updated the headline tracker in a wile, so I'm kind of afraid to go looking at it to find out how much data I've actually lost because the New York Times has changed its layout and I haven't. Any artists looking for an ongoing project?
• Short stories in general still feel more comfortable to me, but I haven't cranked any of those out in a while either. That whole "writing for money" thing feels like a weird and beautiful dream I had once, and now I'm awake. That's not really the right attitude to take; that should be the awake state, and this should be my unholy nightmare.
• My investment account hasn't really been touched in a while, which is irksome. I'm still putting some money aside now and again into it, but not as much as I'd like. Plus, there's now a class-action lawsuit against one of the companies in which I'm invested, accusing the management of the company of withholding information to keep the stock price elevated. I may have less than a hundred shares in their business, but they still represented the largest percentage of my holdings at the time they collapsed, and even now they're still the second-largest chunk of my portfolio. Seeing the suit, I'm tempted to sell, but I'm afraid if I do that the money I've lost on the investment will vanish completely; at least if I hold them I'm getting dividends out of the deal, and as a REIT, they're obligated by law to pay those.
• The big reason that I'm not spending more on investments is my debt. It's down for the year, but it's still over where it should be... which is to say I still have debt. The mortgage doesn't bother me, but the credit card debt does, even if the interest rate is nice and low. Current trend predicts that I'll have that paid off by end of 2007 if I can keep up the payments I'm currently making, faster if I can drop bonus checks and tax returns on it, slower if our expenses keep going up and my income doesn't match it.

I actually had a reasonably long talk with a friend of mine not too long back about money, and more specifically how it is that despite making twice what she does, I don't have any more take-home play money at the end of the month than she does, and often less. So, in the interest of research and discovery, I actually sat down today and updated my budget spreadsheet for 2006. If I did my math right and the guesses I've made about Jessie's and my expenses are anywhere close to accurate and Tanya and Shay both pay their rent and utilities on a regular basis, I should have five thousand dollars left over at the end of the year.

That's five thousand dollars worth of "miscellaneous", for the whole year. No, that's not a mistake. That's around ten percent of my income, a little more net, a little less gross. That doesn't sound like a lot, compared to what I theoretically make, but consider that out of the rest I'm covering two transitions, paying a mortgage, climbing out of debt, paying bills, doing all that stuff that has to be done to keep a house in order. New clothes aren't included, nor are video games that aren't our monthly-payment ones, but eating out is covered under groceries. Basically, if it's fun, exciting or new, it's not in the budget and comes out of that extraneous bucket.

Maybe I should start including an extraneous bucket in the spreadsheet, the fun-and-games budget that gives Jessie and I some psychological constraint on what we can and can't afford to spend. I don't know how much it'll help. Maybe it might even help to get some extra savings accounts. I should start budgeting my investment or retirement options; currently my balance transfer rate is lower than my estimated ROI on the stocks and dividends I've got.

The original intent of this post was to serve as a one-off joke on something silly that arrived in my inbox, and it's turned into a much larger dissertation than I'd intended. Ultimately, I suppose my point is new year, new dreams, new hopes, new changes.

Big money, no whammies.

Today's entry will contain both a sex meme and intimate discussions of post-operative biology. You have been
warned.

First, a meme. Actually, it's not really a meme, so much as it's a questionnaire. An actual meme would be a self-propagating idea, and in this instance I suspect the actual meme is "emulate your friends and fill in these blanks!" However, since the term "meme" has become associated with the online survey that one encourages those one knows to complete as well, I shall endeavor to use the vernacular. The original questions were horribly vague and ill-written, so I've taken the liberty of trying to interpret the questions into some semblance of a proper grammatical list. This may have changed the sense of some of the questions, but if so it's entirely accidental.

At any rate, here we go:

What is your sexual orientation?

Mu. I mean, seriously, the question is meaningless. I'm a male-to-female transsexual happily mated with a
male-to-female transsexual that regularly engages in sexplay and pillowtalk with a broad variety of males, females, and "other." Body is irrelevant. Mind is all-consuming. So, I suppose therefore I shall coin a new word: egosexual. I find people's thoughts sexy. Your spicy brainmeants turn me on.

How often do you think about sex?

To answer this question, I would first have to quantify what percentage of my thoughts are actually sexual,
as distinct from those which are engaging that stimulate sexual ideas as a side effect. Given the way my train of thought can go from pancakes to Poincaré to penetration to programming without warning, I dare not pierce the veil drawn carefully around this mechanism. It might lose its magic.

How often do you have sex?

What constitutes sex? Joining the Smart Patrol is only one fraction of the whole of potential intimate contact, which in turn is only one fraction of the whole of potential intimate experience. William Gibson once wrote a story about alien life forms that had sex by touching hips while drinking alcoholic beverages at a bar. "Crystal Cold" from the One Must Fall: Battlegrounds "soundtrack" is pretty damn close to sex. I'm sure things others consider sex would leave me standing confused.

What has been your worst sexual experience?

My ex. Imagine the response a physically virgin, pre-awareness transsexual must have had under the "tender guidance" of an abusive boyfriend with a few years of sexual experience. Imagine earning the nickname "Mr. Floppy". Imagine having a lover that only ever wants to be tied up and penetrated but refuses to reciprocate with anything more than a handjob once a month. Imagine any talk of sexual interest other than penetration ending with "that's weird and I don't like it". Imagine spending six years in that relationship. Imagine looking forward to the abuse because at least it's not being alone

What are your thoughts on cybersex and phone sex?

I think there should be more of both. I think people who treat cybersex and phone sex as somehow fundamentally different from physical intimacy are fooling themselves. The two experiences aren't directly analogous, but they aren't as removed from each other as people would like to claim. If it's not stimulating the parts of the brain that turn you on, you're not doing it right, and that goes for any act. Likewise, if it's pushing your buttons, then you're on the right track. A hand is far more intimate than a cursor, but both have the power to arouse.

What are your thoughts on casual sex?

As opposed to... what? At what point in the relationship between people does sex stop being "casual" and
become something else? Let me approach this from the other side and say that people who "cheat", which is to say people who have sex with other people while maintaining agreements to not sleep with those people with still other people, are a major turn-off for me. I don't belive that affairs are acceptable. That said, if everyone involved knows and nobody's bothered by it, then what does it matter?

What is your favorite euphemism for masturbation?

Close your mouth, relax, pinch one cheek between thumb and forefinger, and then gently but quickly pull the cheek away from the cheekbone and push back towards it.

What sex toys and fetish accessories do you own?

I have several zillion neurons sitting between my ears and several dozen square feet of skin loaded with
touch-sensitive nerves. Anything beyond that is a prop.

What do you consider to be the least sexy body part?

All of them are pretty funny, really.

What is your favorite body type?

Mu. See above for explanation.

Do you like body hair, yes or no?

This is another one of those all-or-nothing issues. A proper pelt or bare skin, or something else entirely, but weird mutant hairs or stubble are not part of my gameplan.

Are you monogamous?

Part of what makes this quiz so damn funny is the fact that the questions are so leading. The assumptions
behind them are incredible. What does "monogamous" mean in this context? Can someone be called monogamous—literally, one mate—if zie's in a committed and faithful threesome? If my mate entices me into subspace and then orders me under the dinner table to service everyone at the party, what then? What if I have standing permission to sleep with a set number of people that my mate has vetted and found acceptable for intimacy? Sexual fidelity, like sex itself, is not a mere pair of polar opposites: faithful or unfaithful, male or female. There is a broad spectrum of commitment ranging from "I sleep with anyone I wish and feel no need to tell any one partner about any other" to "I sleep with one person and that one person only to the exclusion of all others," with a myriad of variants between.

What styles of underwear do you prefer?

Those that emphasize the contents and inflame the mind. Those that are incongruous with the body beneath and encourage embarrassment and secret vice. Those that are sexy and slutty worn beneath the strictest business suit.

Do you prefer pornography or eroticism?

What's the difference?

How large is your pornography collection?

What I find arousing can change at the drop of a garter. Thus, what I consider pornographic can change at any given instant. If I list only those things which I find appealing right now, my collection is very small. If I include anything that's ever aroused me that I've kept for that purpose, my collection is quite large.

What is your favorite hair color?

Assuming for the moment that I find bodies in general appealing, I'll go out on a limb and say that I like either grey hair or well-done subtle-but-unnatural shades. Bright colors tend to turn me off, but I think a tasteful head of soft pastel blue or deep hunter green hair would be absolutely gorgeous.

Do you prefer kissing or cuddling?

Cuddling. To quote from Bloom County, "lip-mashing is an oddity in the animal kingdom".

Which ethnicity or nationality do you find most attractive?

Again with the body obsessions. How about instead I talk about the cultures I find attractive and sexy?
Cheerfully propagandistic, repressive societies give me perverse interest because of the opportunities for furtive groping and hiding sex acts from the commissars. This could be anything from the KGB to the HUAC, but it's the hidden-vice angle that gets me.

Which furry creature do you find most attractive?

Ah-hah! Now we start getting into the realms of the interesting. Of course, being a being of many
moods, it depends on context and person. Somebody has to wear the body well, and what looks good on one personality will not necessarily work for all of them. When I'm in a mood for a dominating, powerful partner, I go for heavy predator types: bears, big cats, wild canids. When I'm feeling dommy, I prefer prey species: rabbits, mice, domesticated dogs. If I'm feeling ambivalent, what I find attractive can swing wildly, and whatever strikes my fancy has a strong chance of pushing me into one mindset or another. Irrespective of mood, vivid fur patterns such as stripes, spots, rosettes, and the like are always a positive.

Which furry creature do you find least attractive?

Male lions do not do it for me. Sorry, they just don't. They don't look sleek or regal; they're just silly. Lionesses, however, are still a go. Aquatics and avians don't interest me, though wings on regular furries are strangely compelling; they have the power to lend supernatural and otherworldly appeal to otherwise unremarkable creatures when done properly. Horses and hoofed mammals in general don't actively hook me, but I wouldn't kick one out of my bed.

What is the most unusual kink you know, not necessarily your own?

Every kink is unusual, in some fashion. After all, kink is personalized, and what you find kinky may turn off someone else. In fact, it probably will. Further, the Sears and Roebuck Theory of Kink suggests that if you select a random object from a Sears and Roebuck catalog, somebody somewhere is likely <sound of cheek smacking> either to that object or to pictures of it. In addition, I have myself acquired kinks over time as people have successfully pitched them to me in a fashion that I could myself find arousing. As a result, I try very hard to think of every kink as equal in some fashion. If I deride it today, it's probably what I'll be fantasizing tomorrow.

What are your kinks?

In no particular order, the most prominent of my ever-changing set of "that which turns me on" are

Lactation

Perhaps it's a nature of not being able to do it, at least yet, but this pushes my buttons hard. I want to be able to nurse others. I find the idea of others nursing from me powerfully arousing. I want bigger breasts that will support more milk.

Pet Play

Putting down the burden of humanity and being an animal turns me on. Being treated as an animal, or a toy, or someone's plaything, really turns me on. Let me be th' buni. Yes, it's probably creepy. I don't care.

Exhibition

I want to be seen. I want to be shown off. I want to be exposed. I want to be used in public. The chance of being caught pushes the same button, hence the discussion above about propagandistic societies.

Bondage

Tether me, hobble me, restrict me. Take away my hands, my voice, my legs. Make me less than whole.

Piercing

Mark my body in a permanent way. Tie me up with my own body. Put cool metal through my hot flesh.

Chastity Play

Let me be aroused, but don't let me climax. Keep me on the edge of release as long as you can.

These are, of course, only a subset of my interests, but they probably make up the lion's share of them.

---

Last night, three years post-op, I achieved for the first time a climax brought about by another person's direct actions.

Until this point, whenever we played together, whatever else was happening, it was my fingers between my legs, me playing with myself while other people did other things to me elsewhere. If it wasn't my fingers, it wasn't going to lead anywhere. However good it felt, it wasn't going to make me orgasm.

Jessie was tender, intimate, careful, and very very insistent. She touched me expertly, and I responded. It took time, and at times I thought I was going to have to stop again, but she didn't want to quit and I didn't want her to do so. I wanted it, after so long, and apparently I was ready for it, because when it happened it was one of the most incredible releases I'd ever had.

When the rush and thrill had faded, I felt as if the disappointment and doubt in what I had done to myself in 2002 were finally gone. I had been afraid for so long that I would never feel another person give me that release, but it happened and everything felt... perfect.

To hell with the hype. There was something magical in that moment, something I may never feel again in any other orgasm, but that I know I've achieved it once, and that was enough.

It only gets better from here. 

Much has happened. Much needs to be said.

Last night, I experienced my first PvP in CoH. If my physical responses to it are in any way indicative of my usual response to such things, as I suspect they are, then it was my last as well. I spent the next three hours twitching, shaking and shivering. My arms and legs felt cold, my hands shook, my eyes couldn't focus properly, my chest felt tight and my breathing was shallow. Consciously, I recognize this as fight-or-flight, and I'll go so far as to say that this probably isn't the same response that most people get to "playing a video game." If they did, I highly doubt that any but the most crazed adrenalin-junkies would ever play such games.

I fear the world in which most people are this kind of adrenalin junkie.

Honestly, I get the same response in any one-on-one competition. I got it when I was playing Tetris Attack against Jessie. I got it when I was playing Super Smash Brothers Melee against... anyone, really. At least, I got it back when I was unskilled and unpracticed. Once I felt like I had some measure of competency, it wasn't really an issue, but until I felt like I knew what I was doing, I got this same sick sensation every time I played against anyone else. It wasn't fun, and it wasn't healthy.

Two things are at play here. The first is that I hate feeling incompetent. I still get the same response in SSBM or Tetris Attack that I used to get when I first started when I play against people who are far better than I am. This may be a testosterone thing, or some other neurochemistry thing. I get this need to prove myself somehow, like I have to win, even just once, to show that I'm not a total waste of flesh. It's stupid and pointless, but I get into this feedback loop anyway, of each pass being worse than the next, every loss making victory that much harder because of the physical response to the defeat. It's a vicious cycle that ultimately I either break by winning and immediately quitting, which makes me look like a shit, or giving up, which makes me feel like a shit. Neither behavior is one of a responsible, rational adult.

Then again, I never claimed to be either.

The second—lesser but still important—issue is that I can't read the emotions of people I don't know, and their
intent is very important to me. For someone as able as I am to emotionally detach from people, I get pretty screwed up when I start thinking that other people are out to hurt me. I can't seem to shake the idea that the typical PvP player is in it not for the friendly competition about which one can joke and reminisce later, but the "lol what omg" Internet B crowd that are out to piss in people's cornflakes and then claim that it proves something about their virility in bed. This is my dysfunction and I recognize that, and I don't ask other people to understand or accept it, but I almost universally ascribe worse intent and meaning to the actions of people I don't know than are intended, and I usually assume the worst about others just as a matter of habit. It takes a lot for me to overcome that, and I'm often amazed that I've managed to do so for as many people as I have, but for the vast majority of humanity, I see little reason to bother trying. Thus, it feels like most of the people I'm going to face in any sort of PvP setting are in it only to assert the size of their eTesticles, and I've got better things to do than give them a reason to brag at my expense.

So, from now on, I think I'm just going to stick to the hero side of CoH. I'm not even sure I'm going to bother buying City of Villains, either. It'd be nice to have the extra character slots on each server, and yes I'd love to see the additional content they've added, but I just don't go in for all the darkity-dark-dark bad-guy stuff that they seem to have geared the game to support. If I'm going to play a "villain," it's going to be somebody that has to operate outside the law and has little regard for the structures of civilization as they currently exist, but who ultimately isn't a bad person and has a very strong personal moral code. That doesn't seem to be the sort of person that the game is trying to endorse. 

Maybe when the unit price falls to thirty dollars like City of Heroes, I'll give it a look-see.

---

This past weekend, Jessie and I went to visit her family, my in-laws, in Shreveport. Having in-laws still, in some very small ways, creeps me out. The idea of having someone related to me that isn't by blood or direct choice is kind of strange, and the idea that someone could have feelings for someone else based on a vicarious relationship gives me goosebumps and not in a good way. Still, I suppose that where genetics and desire overlap, there can be some sort of transitive family equation: "I like you, and you like zim, ergo I like zim as well." This isn't lossless, and it's not necessarily reciprocal, but it can happen. It just never did for me before getting in with my wife.

The trip itself was... interesting. Normally I love flying, but I hate flying coach. My hips do not fit into a standard
economy seat, and I think even if I were to shed the eighty pounds I need to lose and the forty beyond that that I'd like to misplace that I would not be able to comfortably lower both armrests even in a standard size seat. It's just not going to happen. Plus, on one leg of the trip down from Pennsylvania to Louisiana, we got to fly in an Embraer minijet, which Jessie likened unto a coffee can with flaps. Neither she nor I fit in the seats with any degree of comfort, a fact that I think directly contributes to my having left my Nintendo DS with Advance Wars GBA and Advance Wars DS in the seatback pocket in front of me when I debarked; I was in too much of a hurry to stand and stretch my legs.

This year, we were not only trying to make up for last year's lack of a real visit but also to cram an early Christmas into the schedule. As I've said before, I don't really go in for the whole Christmas thing personally, but I know it's a really big emotional investment for Jessie's mother, so I go along with it as best as I'm able. We managed to find a number of collectable Barbies that I knew she wanted, and she tried to find us flannel sheets but there really aren't many stores in Louisiana that will sell them; it's just not going to be a popular item there. So, she ended up giving us the money to pick up our own and instructions to tell her what we got when we got them. It's an arrangement with which I can work without an issue.

In addition to that, we got to see a little bit of local television, and I'm reminded of why not only I don't watch TV any more but why I'm glad to be out of "the South". The number of references to church, religion and worship that occured during the commercial breaks frightened me. Living in my little Universe A bubble, I can oft-times forget how little I share spiritually with the people around me, and so that sort of exposure can easily lead to an overload of discomfort. I very much wanted to walk away from the set and go play with my Treo or Jessie's DS or even sit and stare at the walls; it would've hurt my brain less.

On the other hand, though, I did get to see an episode of the new Outer Limits show and for once I'm glad I
caught something on television. In this particular episode, children exposed to alien transmissions experience euphoria and a desire to share it with other people, but adults only hear the broadcast as garbled sounds. Everyone treats the "alien music" as an attack, until a twenty-four-year-old cracks the code and discovers that the broadcast is meant to protect terrestrial lifeforms against sharply increased ultraviolet radiation and is being sent from a planet orbiting a star that had recently—within the last sixty years—undergone stellar conversion to a type that put out increased UV. After the discovery, the alien broadcast is transmitted planetwide and a hormonal treatment is created to allow adults as well as children to hear the "music," which turns people into hairless metallic-sheen-skinned beings. Everyone then goes outside to watch the sky shift from blue to deep red as the sun shifts to a new spectrum.

About the only things missing on the Puzzlebox Kink Chart were antennae and antique internal-combustion engines.

In general, the trip was a positive one, but there's one thing that does honestly grate on my nerves when we visit, and that's the fact that Jessie's father seems incapable of remembering to get Jessie's pronouns right. She's not going to push him on it because she's got problems believing that she's made enough progress to justify making a fuss over it, but I don't think she really understands the psychological impact that having someone who professes to love you on one hand and can't respect you enough to be conscious of your stated choices on the other can have. I've done eerything I can to stand up for her without outright being confrontational, but I'm afraid it may get to that point. I know she did the same for me when it was my parents who couldn't keep things straight; I see no reason not to do the same for her.

Of course, I don't want to be the wedge between them either. I'd feel really shitty if I were.

The flight out was, if anything, even more "interesting" than the trip down to Shreveport. In retribution for
her comment about coffee can with flaps, we had to fly from Shreveport back to Houston on a turbo prop, which was even smaller than the Embraer! Then the flight from Houston to Philadelphia itself was completely full, meaning even less leg room than before, so by the time we arrived back home, we were both pretty miserable. I still love the experience of flying, but the actual intimate details of the act, I could do without.

Maybe from now on, I just need to insist on first class.

---

Today was my first day back at work after five days of vacation, and already I feel like I'm ready for more time away from the office. It's not necessarily that things are bad so much as that things are not getting better.

Last week, someone in upper management—as in vice president or director or something executive like that—decided that it was a crisis that the distribution centers were having all these "fatal errors" and bouts of indetermine slowness in the network and periods of system freezing in the application software, and they decided
to put together a cross-functional crisis response team to resolve these issues once and for all. Because I'm the only one in Application Support on-site at a distribution center, my manager named me as the App Support member to the team, which I had no problem accepting even if I'd had an option to decline.

Three days later, I went on vacation. At my manager's request, I sent out a notice to everyone in the response team that I would be unavailable for five days and that my backup would be able to handle any problem in my absense. I gave contact information and even said that I wouldn't have access to the company VPN since my in-laws don't have broadband.

While in Shreveport, I received a call from Event Moderation asking me to join the command bridge.

Now, I can understand not checking one's e-mail. I'm sometimes guilty of letting messages pile up myself. Even now I have eighty unread messages in my inbox at work, and that's down from three-hundred-something from this morning. I can't understand why people attached to an issue this theoretically critical would not read every email relating to it.

Then again, there's a lot about this issue that seems politically motivated, aside from my manager's statement that, and I quote, "this issue is being driven politically from above." Nobody on the floor of the warehouses seems to be that up in arms over this problem, which they say has improved since installing the new scan guns and RF network; but upper management says that the problem has only been getting worse over time. The vendors have said repeatedly that one-hundred-percent connectivity in an RF environment in an unshielded building, but upper management refuses to accept "the hardware literally can't do that"as an answer. This is a problem, as far as they're concerned, and it has to be fixed, whatever it takes.

I do not want to be caught in the fallout when somebody discovers that it can't be fixed and has to start lopping off heads to protect zir job.

Today, I also found out that my manager has been reshuffled to another group pending a split in reponsibilities between our team and Application Support Reporting, and that a manager from another team is being moved into his position. This will be the third manager I've had at this company in less than a year, and I haven't changed jobs yet. 

As I said to a coworker on my daily conference call, before anyone else arrived, it's really starting to feel like a
sinking ship around here. 

Stop the world; I want to get off. 

Today promises to be another day that I typically consider "low-brain" or "bad brain". I went to bed later that I should have, then got woken up by the phone half an hour early when Operations said we had a high ticket to resolve. Five minutes of work proved that it wasn't our department with the problem, that the data center in Atlanta had shut down a computer and not started it again afterwards, and that I really had no reason to remain on the call. Of course, apparently our group is the only division within the company with sufficient end-to-end process analysis skill to be able to say "the software—Supply Chain—ran fine, and the printer queue—Unix Sysadmin—shows the jobs queued, but the print server—Microsoft Sysadmin—isn't responding to pings, so please get these other groups on the call and we'll figure out what else is wrong once that server is online again."

The instant that server came back online, all the printers started working again. Quelle surprise.

The irritating thing about this call wasn't that I had to get out of bed half an hour before my alarm clock woke me. That's part and parcel of being on-call, and there's really not a lot I can say to or about or even against it; that's part of why they pay me the big bucks. What really chafes my chaps is that once I had established that this wasn't a Supply Chain issue, I had to remain on the line for an additional half hour to coordinate the troubleshooting operation. I never outright had to do somebody else's job for that person, but I did have to connect the dots instead of simply being responsible for my dot like most of the other on-calls on the bridge.

If this were a one-off event, I'd chalk it up to exposure or experience or some damn-fool something-something and ignore it, but it feels systemic. If anything goes wrong in the way our subsystem works, not only do we have to prove that it's nothing we did wrong, but we then have to play an active role in diagnosing back up the data flow diagram to find the point of failure and help troubleshoot it. Because we've been heaped with so much downhill-rolling-manure, we've all been forced to become competant in how the rest of the system works, and that means we end up doing at least some amount of other people's jobs for them. If that's what it takes to make product move out the door on time, then so be it, but eventually there's going to have to be a reckoning on this.

Unfortunately, I think that reckoning may be coming sooner rather than later. I had a long talk Friday with one of the people that works in the same facility I do, and he's on the verge of taking another job. If he goes, at least in the short term we're going to be in a world of hurt while we look for a replacement. In the long run, hopefully the impact can be minimized, but there's really no way to predict. The person looking at leaving is every manager's and supervisor's primary or secondary backup. He's the one that does everyone else's job when other people are sick or on vacation. With him gone, there's going to be nobody who can fill in every gap he fills, and that's going to make a lot of people very exposed and unhappy.

With any luck, it will expose a few people who very desperately need to be exposed, and my job will become easier once the burden of carrying them is lifted. In the near term, though, things are going to get mighty rough for a bit, and my patience with this place is going to be even shorter, if that's possible.

---

I found this essay today from, of all people, Ilthuain. I'm not sure what I was doing there, really. I poked my
nose at it out of curiosity, mostly wondering if the intarweb death of another friend had caused any gloating or cheer, but then I happened to find the aforementioned link, and it cogently and coherently organized a lot of ideas that I myself hadn't entirely processed and assembled them into a readable format. I don't want to bore the masses with a rehash of what the article says, but I do want to sum up the two primary points that struck me upon consumption and analysis:

This is not my tribe.

I'm stealing this line directly from Lord Fanny, simply because she said it so beautifully and succinctly. Every survey of religious views in this country says that eighty-five percent of this country are self-identified Christians. Eighty-five percent. That's seventeen in every twenty. Think of twenty people in your circle of friends. I am one of the leftover three. Jessie's probably the second.

I suppose I knew this, either intellectually or subconciously, without ever really analyzing it to any great degree. Religious—specifically Judeo-Christian—iconography and symbology saturates American culture to an inescapable degree. It is impossible to have a discourse on ethics in this country without an assumption that religion must be a part of it. Even Israel, a country one would think is inextricably tied with its faith, only has a seventy-seven percent professed belief rate in Judaism. If the Christian Faith were a business, we'd have sued it for anti-trust violations. 

Now, consider me and my circle of friends. I think, of all the people I consider "friends and acquaintences," less than half a dozen actually profess to any degree of Judeo-Christian adherence, and much of that is either residual or familial. Remove the "and acquaintences" part, and the number is... one. Maybe two, if you stretch the definitions of both "Christian" and "friend". This culture isn't my culture. This environment isn't my environment. This society isn't my society. Being an American is to a very large extent being at least a lip-service Christian, and I simply am not and have no desire to be.

Again, intellectually, I know about the freedom of religion and the First Amendment and the protections on attending the service of your choice and the like, but I possess no real sense that I or my friends will ever really belong to this culture. What is the likelihood that an atheist, agnostic, shaman or pagan will have a successful political career? Where are the humanist role models taught in schools and not painted as, at best, good people who had the misfortune of not being Christian? Where is the recognition that the words "under God" were added to the Pledge of Allegiance during a period of nationalist fervor by a frightened Congress struggling to differentiate America from Communist Russian and Chinese interests who had nuclear weapons and weren't afraid to use them?

According to the latest Gallup poll on the matter, this year marks the first time since record-keeping of the like became available that a majority of American people would consider electing an atheist for President, by a forty-nine to forty-eight percent vote. Prior to that, we were the last great minority considered too dangerous to let into public office. Even homosexuals have passed us in electability, at fifty-nine percent. I actually cringed hearing John Roberts ending his confirmation recital with "so help me God", as though it took recognition from a higher power to sanction one's ability to tell right from wrong.

I've seen a few articles that suggest that all this God-talk is ultimately good for us atheists, because the use of the Lord's Name is becoming so vacuous and empty that it's passing into the throwaway stage, the meaningless quip that people add to the end of their speeches to connect culturally with their peers, kind of like Canadians using "eh" at the ends of their sentences. Personally, though, I find it alienating and exclusive. It may be an attempt to connect emotionally with people, but what it does is remind me that I share a culture different from that of "my fellow Americans," one steeped in a very different mythology, one that bars me and anyone who thinks like I do from having any real chance at having a say in how the country works.

This will never be my tribe.

To be utterly fair, things are changing. That figure of forty-nine percent acceptability is moving up over time; it was less than one in five fifty years ago, and only one in three as late as the 1970s. Despite numerous references to atheism being the "other closet" it's not really a social taboo to admit one is an atheist in public. Sure, it bars me from holding office entirely in eight states including the one in which I reside, but that's still better than three-fourths who say I'm an okay person for the job, right? Maybe there might one day even be an atheist comedy on public television, with sort of funny Bertrand Russell type to play humorously off of a religious friend. The execs could call it "Amazing Grace" and follow a non-believer housewife in suburban America as she tries to navigate the waters of mid-afternoon kaffeeklatsch with her devout neighbors! It probably wouldn't sell in Atlanta, but it might make it in Akron. 

However, my question is whether they're changing fast enough. It took the Southern Baptist Convention over a hundred years to apologize for endorsing slavery. How long is it going to take them to do the same for us heathens? Can we even really think that organized religion will ever openly and publicly admit that they have done anyone a disservice by stating that they encouraged people for hundreds of years to think of those who disagreed with their views were not bad people, especially in light of the viral agent within the Christianity meme that propagates itself as the One True Faith? They're having a hard enough time admitting that Muslims and Jews follow the same god as them; why should we expect an advanced timetable given we don't even follow a god?

Then again, it's not really about the atheism. I mean, when all is said and done I'm not really an atheist. I'm an agnostic with shamanistic, totemistic, SubGenius and Discordian leanings, but for the purposes of discussions I cling to the atheist position through the generous application of the Null Hypothesis of "there is no proof for God" and relying on the counterclaim of there being no proof against God to fall under its own weight of assumption. I have a lot of beliefs on the nature of religion as a meta-discussion to religion itself and why people believe what they believe, which in turn are subject to my own meta-beliefs on why I believe those things, and so on and so forth in a Nautilus-spiral of ever-widening assumptions and inductions about the functioning of the human mind. 

Plus, even beyond whether it's changing fast enough is the question of whether it can change enough. Not only am I "an atheist," but I'm also a a bisexual, a polysexual, a transsexual, and a minarchist socialist libertarian, and those are just the obvious subcultures, the ones large enough to attract movements to them. Yes, that last really does exist, no it's not a contradiction in terms, and yes I can explain it but you're going to have to give me more room and time than I want to devote right now to how my head works in favor of talking about how my head works differently from those of the heads around me.

Any one of those would be enough to ostracize me from some segment of the mainstream. Two and I'm really pushing it. Three or more and the sigma of my standard and nonstandard deviations becomes so significant that I might as well not compare my culture to that of what most people would consider "my contemporaries." I just don't have a common enough frame of reference. That doesn't make them bad people, but neither does it make me a bad person. It makes me... an outsider. Someone that's just not part of the group, and never will be. At least, not in any time frame that makes expecting it to happen within my lifetime a reasonable goal. 

In American history, we're taught that the Southern States left the Union, but what's not so well-remembered by most students is the reason why. Everyone knows it was ultimately "over slavery," but the real crux of the matter is the states traditionally considered Southern, those south of the Mason-Dixon line, realized that if every northern Senator lined up in unified support of a law attacking some facet of the South's economy or way of life, they had the strength in numbers to overturn a presidential veto. In short, they knew that their days were numbered, and that their power to fight back against policies made against them had been removed by the government. They left, not because they wanted to necessarily preserve slavery, but because they knew they didn't stand a chance of getting a fair shake in government. 

I don't even feel I have that.

I guess ultimately that my complaint about America—and my single biggest argument for leaving it—is the sense
of systematic and systemic disenfranchisement. It's not that I don't have a vote. It's not that I can't vote. It's that I
know by force of majority rules that my vote will never mean anything on any reasonable scale. This is not just a matter of the voter's paradox. This is, I hope, a very realistic appraisal of the state of American politics as it stands today and a legitimate extrapolation of what is likely over my lifetime. Culture simply isn't going to shift far enough fast enough to make me feel like I ever have a chance to have a say in American politics. Too many things would have to change for me to feel like I'm close enough to the theoretical "center" to even count on the political map. 

I took the political analysis at Political Compass. Based on their questionnaire, I come in somewhere between Gandhi and the Dalai Lama for politics and moral views. Actually, I come in slightly more to the left of the Dalai Lama, and slightly more to the libertarian of Gandhi. In contrast, Kerry and Bush both fall in the authoritarian/conservative camp, the only difference being a matter of degree. The only other world leader anywhere close to my ideals was Nelson Mandela, and he spent forty years in jail for his views. Gandhi fought British imperialism his entire life. The Dalai Lama's living in exile and is considered persona non grata among many world leaders because supporting him means losing one billion Chinese consumers. With those kinds of role models, is there any surprise that I "hate America"?

So, I suppose the next big question is... what does one do in this kind of situation? Running to Canada's not really an answer. It's an improvement, to be sure, but it's a bandage, a patch, a temporary fix at best. Canada's an improvement over the United States in terms of political and economic center, but it's still not really an improvement. Europe appears to be an improvement over Canada, but there are other factors that serve as a barrier there, such as language, employment, and citizenship. Perhaps the Buddhist Bhutan might serve as an ideal social environment, but the technology barrier there is so limited that I doubt I could ever truly be happy in such a place despite their governmental mandate to increase the Gross Domestic Happiness of their citizenry.

Where do you go when there's no place on Earth for "your kind"?

The facile answer of "make a place" seems to be about the only real solution. Lunar colonies and breakaway
warrens aside, let this be a declaration of intent. I want to build a place, maybe not a nation, maybe not a state, maybe not even a town, but a place on some scale and some magnitude, that's made for "our kind". I want a Home, a sanctum sanctorum that legalises pot and outlaws Sunday school. I want a twenty-year plan among my friends and family to converge on some place, be it Ontario, Vermont, Maine, the Mariana Trench or Mare Sagitarius, and reshape it into the world we believe we should have. Let's quit talking about wouldn't it be nice and maybe one day they'll let us and get on with the real and fundamental task of worldbuilding.

Get yourself out of debt. Put aside some money for relocation. Buy a motor home. Find a way to telecommute or make yourself employable in any market. Figure out how many people you're willing and able to carry and negotiate with them for coverage while we remake our small garden. Start looking at real estate. Prepare for war.

Someday we'll live among the stars, maybe own a Ranch On Mars.