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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, in recap:

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

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

A true initiation never ends.

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, it's time to do something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someday we'll live among the stars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My politics are different.

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

My religion is different.

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

My sexuality is different.

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

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

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

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

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

My relationships are different.

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

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

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

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

Come sail away with me.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This may actually happen for Jessie and I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.