0002 Lakera 22: Court

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the rooftops, shout it out.

---

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

Thus, it became time to prepare Emergency Food.

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

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

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

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

0002 Indera 21: Holidays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, how wrong I was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, I declared bankruptcy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0002 Vasera 21: Calendar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like sands through an hourglass....

0002 Jevera 15: Behind

Three months.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until that day....

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0002 Zelera 11: Review

Bwah.

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

1. Everything for Anthrocon is prepped. The room is reserved for a week, the plane tickets are for the same time period, and I have ten days of vacation reserved at work. We leave Seattle on the 23rd of Byeta and return on the 2nd of Jeva. For those of you on the Gregorian Calendar, that's July 3 to 10. I've also got a day off of work on either side to make sure I don't immediately compress into a tight ball of shock and misery upon touching ground in Seattle after the closest thing I have to a yearly church retreat.

   It still feels a little weird to say it like that, but cons are really the closest thing I get to being in a large crowd of people and yet still feeling like I'm around people who have a hope in hell of understanding. This isn't to say that they will, but it's a damnsight more likely than taking an average random collection of strangers off the street. Of course, when I say "understand," I mean more in the general sense of "empathize with the nature of my existence,"which is a concept that I don't really think we can easily express in English.

2. I got a FurAffinityaccount. I did feel kind of dirty about it at first, but a very large part of that stems from the fact that the typical writer on there is... not that good, comparatively speaking. The furry fandom in general is a much more visual medium than it is a verbal one, with the consequence and subsequent cause that the bar for what is considered good writing is a lot lower than the bar for what is considered good illustration. Thus, more people who write mediocre stories get praised for good work, and the bar falls farther, and so on and so forth. So, I was a little leery of even trying to wade into the pool.

   Of course, the truth is that I'm already in the pool, and up until now I've really just been sort of standing around sulking that nobody was playing with me and bitching about how bad things are. So, this is really my attempt to jump into the deep end and maybe start reversing the previous trend. It may not work, but if it does then things are great, and if it doesn't then I'm really not out anything except a bit of dignity.

3. Coincidental with the FA account, I've started a new ongoing storytitled, "Beautifuil World". The history for the setting is... complex. When I was driving cross-country from Pennsylvania to Washington, one of the many topics that arose during the trip was a new MUCK to replace or supplant or support Puzzlebox, and the idea upon which I hit was that of a virtual world in which the inhabitants all knew that they were in a virtual world, and could operate as such. Digital sentiences, hackers, and uploaded minds all interacting in a realm limited only by the creativity of the players involved.

   The idea ended up not going anywhere as a MUCK, mostly because I didn't feel like investing the energy to try to create one and code it up and maintain it. However, the idea for the setting remained in my head, lingering around and making faces at the other story settings in which I'd been working. So, with the creation of the new account, I decided to go ahead and indulge the idea and give it a bit of freedom. Since then, I've already written eight-thousand words, which isn't bad at all for me given my usual pace of writing. If I keep this up, I'll have a novel by the end of the summer.

4. Pathia has moved in with Jessie, Tanya, and I. The apartment's a little cramped, but with some judicious juggling of suitcases and other things, we should be able to wedge everything into the available space. She's already working again, and she seems pleased with that. It's not a brilliant job, but Washington State has some pretty flash labor laws, so she's making decent money.

5. My job at T-Mobile remains stable, even "good" by some standards. I got a fairly decent raise at my annual review, and tomorrow I'll get a good-sized bonus check that will go a long way towards covering the currently outstanding credit card debt.
6. The house in Pottstown still hasn't sold, but at least the work is done, and the showings have picked back up. Two last week, and one the week before that actually looked ready to buy until an attack of cold feet occurred. I can't blame them for that; I had a few of those myself when Jessie and I were shopping for a permanent residence.

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

I feel happy.

0001 Kolera 24: Interviews

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

... anyway....

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

From Torque:

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

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

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

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

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

Would you feel comfortable with me being a global dictator?

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

Would you swap lives with any of your characters willingly?

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

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

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

From Jessie:

Pick the political figure you most wish would spontaneously combust.

Leo Strauss.

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

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

What do you miss most about Pennsylvania?

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

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

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

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

• Gerald from ASB
• Chinook from the Shalek games
• Marrita

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

0001 Lakera 22: Flushed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three steps forward, two steps back.

0001 Lakera 11: Requiescat

Resquiescat In Pacem: Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do vote

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

Don't vote for any candidate that rejects public funding

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

Do look into third-party alternatives

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

Don't give them money

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

Do support organizations working for campaign reform

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

• FairVote
• The Coalition for Free and Open Elections
• ReformElections.org
• Public Campaigns

Don't partake of the election hysteria

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

Do talk to others

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

Don't give up.

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

The longest journey starts with a single step.