You should just trust me when I say that I'm all kinds of messed up.

Seriously.  My parents are embroiled in something like a 30-year marriage that's been completely loveless for as far back as I can remember, and they've conditioned me to feel subconsciously that there is no truth to a happy ending, even though I want one more than anything in the world.  When I'm dating somebody and things are going well, I'm ensnared by the fear that for no perceptible reason it will all end and there'll be nothing I can do about it.

I'm in love with an ex who consistently tells me he doesn't feel the same way anymore, yet I rely so much on the time we spend with each other now, even though it felt like I was just going through the motions when I spent time with him while we went out.  A good number of days I feel shattered because I don't have him anymore, I even dream about him half of my nights, and at the same time I know that I'd just go back to taking him for granted if we got back together.  And I like that he's able to be his own person now, but if he were to fall in love again... it'd kill me.

I almost completely hate where I live and want to move to a bigger city, but I'm horrible at meeting new people, and I seem to repel people from asking me to go out, so if I were to do that there's no guarantee that I'd meet anybody new, and then I would have given up the few good friends I already had for nothing.

...I wish I weren't afraid of so much.  I wish I had a different childhood.  I wish I could've loved you when I had the chance.

EDIT: This song came on literally as I clicked post.  Talk about providence.

The Hardest Part of Buying a Mac

When I was in high school, I had a laptop.  It was the first computer in our family to have Windows XP.  Up until then, we’d had Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows Millennium Edition on family computers.  My family was never raised around anything different, least of all Macs. Nobody we ever knew had used Macs.  At all.  I guess it’s just the result of being in smaller communities my whole life, but that’s how it goes.  The only time we were ever exposed to Macs were in quick 30-second shots of them on commercials, and my Dad would always change the channel when they came on.  Not Mac commercials, I mean.  Commercials, period.  He hated all commercials, not just the ones for Macs.  There was honestly a large part of my childhood where I wasn’t aware Macs existed at all.  Everyone was a PC.  Everyone...

Then the 1999 iMac came out, bursting onto the scene with its garish purple pinstripe design, its forsaking of the traditional “tower”, and its minimal number of cords.  A power cord, a phone line, and a keyboard and mouse?  What about the sound cables?  What about the cable that connects the monitor?  What about the 32-pin printer cable?  Wait, you’re saying the printer uses the same slot that the keyboard and mouse use?  Wait, you’re saying the keyboard and mouse use the same slots?  And where’s the floppy drive?  I’ve gotta have a floppy drive!  This whole business is preposterous!  It’s an abomination!  PC society won’t stand for this!

In high school, as the iPod was gaining tractions, my friends and I would talk before classes about how dumb anyone would be to want to own a Mac.  It couldn’t play games, and it was weird, I mean, no right-click?  How could anybody like that?  It was entirely weird, and nobody in their right mind could possibly think that it was a sensible way of using a computer.  Seriously, it doesn’t have a right-mouse button.  That’s just wrong.

Then I got brought in on my high school newspaper staff, and the walls came down.  The entire journalism lab was nothing but iMacs.  Every single computer, lacking a tower.  Every single computer, without a right mouse button.  I had no idea how to react.  It was a world that worked entirely differently than the one I had known before.  I didn’t know how to react to it.  So, naturally, I explored the more accessible parts and then railed against them for not being like Windows.  I have to hold down the control button to right-click?  There’s only one menubar at the top of the screen?  All of the keyboard shortcuts are handled through the button with the apple on it?  I hate this all, it’s so unlike the world I came from.

On a completely different note, I was in debate class since I was a freshman.  If my utter fall into academic mediocrity can be traced back to anything, it’s that class, and its GPA-crushing curve.  It was also, not surprisingly, one of my least favorite classes.  The topics we had to prepare cases for were decided upon by some faraway consortium and argued in a style called Lincoln-Douglas.  Why?  Who knows.  The debates were incredibly stuffy and nobody in the class ever truly cared about the topics we were given, so we never talked about them (I mentioned this class crushed my GPA?).  What we did end up talking about was truly the most nefarious topic of any we could consider in the Nebraskan suburb: gay rights.

Now, there were a lot of kids in this debate class, and new ones cycled in every year, but for as many times as I can remember having an argument on gay rights, memory pushes me into a one-versus-many war of ideas.  That’s probably hyperbole, but honestly, I felt entirely outnumbered in those arguments.  It didn’t matter, though.  I knew, no matter what those kids said, that they were wrong.  Homosexuality was a sin, and it didn’t deserve the same rights as a normal lifestyle.

They kept saying my ideas were “unfounded”, but that’s ridiculous.  My ideas were founded in my childhood, in my upbringing.  My family was brought up by the military; For as long as my brother, myself, or my sister had been alive, my dad’s job dictated where we lived.  All of our schooling up until middle school was literally on a military base.  Almost all of our friends were in the exact same position, and heck, none of us knew any gay people.  We knew what the word meant, sure, but to know an actual gay person?  That’d be crazy.  Not that we’d want to, I mean, if talk on the playground was true, then having a gay friend made you gay, too.

The only time we were ever exposed to homosexuality was on TV or in the movies, and then it was only talked about briefly and in jokes before you would move on to another topic.  As a family, we didn’t know any gay people… Well, I guess that isn’t entirely true.  My mom and dad knew that one of my aunts was gay long before any of us kids knew; she was married to a man later described to me as “handsome” and “rich,” and then she left him.  Honestly, if my debate friends didn’t know homosexuality was a sin, they should have after learning that it caused women to leave their husbands who were handsome and rich.  But I didn’t know about her until much later than that incident.  The first gay person that I really knew was my uncle.  A similar story: he met a woman and proposed to her (on Oprah [clue one]), then after a few short years of matrimonial bliss, he left her for reasons my parents weren’t willing to mention.  Then he got a roommate, Scott.  And suddenly that was all nobody talked about.  I heard the word from my brother, from my mom I heard – in angry tones – talk of my uncle and his “roommate” living in “sin”.

How did I feel about all this?  Honestly?  Scared.  I’d been having gay dreams from when I was twelve, and the constant talk of how my uncle (later also my aunt) were going to Hell for their unrepentant “lifestyle” made me fear for my own soul.  Was I just that bad to keep having the dreams?  To keep looking at men?  My brother, through a hilarious incident involving a browser history that I won’t get into, was the first to find out.  It was our secret, and so was the therapist he would take me to on several occasions to try and get better.

Lyle was a really nice guy.  What you’ve probably heard about ex-gay ministries was so wholly unlike my experience.  All we did those sessions was talk; talk about how things were going, talk about how I was feeling that session, talk about my childhood, about my father who –  while he was certainly there in a physical sense – Lyle would assure me was not there emotionally, talk about my mother who – while she was certainly caring – Lyle would assure me was overbearing.  And I’m not going to say he was wrong.  Was my dad distant?  Yeah, like Alaska.  Was my mom overbearing?  Yeah, like wearing two parkas in Alaska.  But in spite of us figuring that all out and talking through it, I didn’t really feel any less gay from our talks.  Maybe he was doing it wrong.

I had my first kiss when I was nearly 18.  It was with a guy named Stephen.  He was a Mac.  It was wetter than I had expected, but it was a lot of fun.  Shortly after that I got a boyfriend, kept in complete secrecy from my parents, my friends, my teachers, and Myspace, which was easy because he lived two hours away.  Of course, after a long chain of hilarious events – starting with a not-so-hilarious suicide on the other side of town – I came out.  First to my friends, then to my drama teacher, then to my mom, then to my parents.  Never to Myspace, though, that site was already gay enough, am I right?

Thanks to journalism, I was also experiencing the Mac side of life.  So, the command button is much closer to the other buttons, which makes your hand cramp less by using shortcuts.  And the main browser is faster than the one on my PC at home.  And you can see all of your open projects with just one button.  And its control-alt-delete equivalent actually closes programs that have frozen.  Okay, using a Mac isn’t as bad or as problematic as I thought it was gonna be, in fact, it’s pretty fun.  But it still can’t play games!

Well, my parents had me see Lyle one last time, after my brother told them about him.  At this final visit, he asked me if changing was something I really wanted for myself.  I told him that honestly, no, it wasn’t.  I liked who I was, and for now it wasn’t really the core “problem” in my life.

When I graduated in May, my extended family got me a total of about $1,000.  I wasn’t allowed to come out to any family members at my graduation.  That summer, Apple made some important changes to their operating system that let you run Windows on a Mac.  In September, I bought the iMac that sits on my desk to this day (I installed Windows on it, but as time went on I used Windows less and less).  I also fell in love for the first time and had the epiphany, however late, that being gay was no more a sin than buying Apple.

There’s this joke my friends make: “The hardest part of buying a Mac is telling your dad that you’re gay.”  I think it’s pretty funny; I also think it’s backwards.  The best part of telling your dad that you’re gay is deciding to buy a Mac.

What I’m really getting at with all this, is if you need any help with your computer or with being gay… I charge $20 for either.

Point, counterpoint (I will continue until it is dead, part two)

That's really not an accurate comparison by tossing out numbers like that. Part of the iPad's power is the operating system, which is refined so that the most processing power can be made out of it. The 1.5 GHz computer you had likely ran Windows XP, which spent more computing power to run the OS than the programs. It also had all of the hardware you outlined above, which requires processing power to physically run, including thermometers, fans, and the spinning motors in the DVD drive. Battery life for laptops around then were between 3 and 4 hours--iPad is over 10. I'm also guessing your laptop wasn't $500, since the net book craze wasn't around then.

I've had an iPad since after the day is came out, and I adore it. It's far easier to bring places in public and write. Games are a ton of fun on it, and it has a gorgeous screen for watching video. It's only 1024x768, but that still includes 720p which is an HD aspect. (People seem to have no problem with their 46" flat screen TVs only reaching 1080p, which is a resolution far smaller computer monitors surpassed many, many years ago.) The screen is only 9.7", so to have a deeper resolution wouldn't really be conducive on the eyes, since text and details in general would be too small.

The iPad is a premium product, not meant to replace a more fully loaded computer, and certainly not worth all of the anger so many people seem to have with its existence. ;)

Reducing the number of applications you can have open and onscreen at a time to "one" is not a refinement. Windows 3.1 could do that quite well. The improved battery life is entirely reliant on the fact that there are no moving parts to the iPad, and there are no (sorry, iCultists. I'm sure you know I mean to say "few") background processes allowed. Yes, my laptop had a shorter battery life because it was able to have concurrent processes, but guess what? being able to watch my physical copy of Wayne's World and IM my friends at the same time was something I *liked* being able to do.

Writing in public on the iPad is also categorically harder than on a laptop, because the keyboard is on the same plane as the screen, meaning that in order to have a workable typing angle you need to have the device at some intermediary angle so that you can see the screen and make sure that your wrists aren't bent at a ridiculous, straining angle. Or, maybe you still fancy the two-plane system and decide to buy the keyboard dock. Congratulations, you just paid extra for an implement that has come with every other personal computer ever. Incidentally, I hear they're coming out with a car that has an optional steering wheel; in order to drive without it, you gesture violently in the direction you want to go and pray to Xerxes that it all comes out alright.

Saying that the iPad has a 720p screen is also a huge steaming pile of half-truth. Yes, it has more than 720 lines of vertical resolution and, yes, all of those lines refresh simultaneously, but any signal transmitted at 720p is always, always, always going to be in widescreen, vis a vis, NOT proportioned to fit your 1024x768 iPad screen. The brilliance of a 1080p TV screen isn't the number of pixels the human eye is picking up, it's in the number of pixels the hardware from which your TV is receiving its signal is sending. Consider the amount of data in a 640x480 broadcast of any half-hour or hour-long show. If you need help doing that, iTunes has plenty of them in standard definition for you to peruse, and you'll see that it's actually a considerable amount of data. Even when the stream is sent as interlaced, and only half of the data is necessary, it's still a lot. Now find something on iTunes that's in 1080p and OH CHRIST HOW ARE WE STREAMING HUNDREDS OF CHANNELS OF THIS NATIONWIDE AROUND THE CLOCK should be your default response, because if all that data were carbon dioxide, Al Gore would never stop crying. Finally, saying it would be a bad idea to have a higher resolution on that small a screen is crap; my Droid actually has a slightly smaller screen than my iPod Touch, but it has over double the resolution, and wouldn't you know it? Things look bloody fantastic when they're that sharp.

You're absolutely right when you say that the iPad is a premium product, and you're absolutely right again when you say it's not meant to replace a more fully-loaded computer. I wouldn't even use it to replace a less loaded computer, but truth be told, I'm not mad at the iPad, not really. To be mad at an inert object - be it a brick, a wall of bricks, an iPad, or a wall of iPads - belies the intelligence on the angry person's part. I'm mad at the overbearingly huge swath of the world population that's convinced that the iPad is better, more practical, or more even prettier than any computer that bears the pre/suffix "mac". The iPad's OS is an offshoot of an offshoot of OSX, and as such, is capable of doing absolutely no more than any computer equipped with OSX Leopard or Snow Leopard would be capable of doing. Absolutely any app made for either the iPhone or the iPad could run on a Mac as is, and there would be no complications. If the thousands of developers who have made half-baked iPhone apps would step up and create half as many apps for the Mac proper, there might not be the stigma that Macs are less capable than Windows computers. Hell, the programmers wouldn't even have to go through the ridiculous approval process if they went that route.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to graft a capacitive touch screen to my iMac, take it to a bar with me, get drunk and leave it there, and then sue the idiot who picks it up for millions.

I will continue until it is dead.

I got a laptop six years ago, with a 1.5GHz processor, a 32 GB hard drive, 512 MB of RAM, a 64 MB video card, an 802.11g wireless card, a DVD-ROM drive, an ethernet port, a video out port, two USB ports, and a FireWire 400 port. That was six years ago.

The iPad has a 1GHz processor, an unknown quantity of RAM (but I'm willing to bet it's not more than 512 MB), integrated video, an 802.11n wireless card, no DVD-ROM, no ethernet, no video out, no USB, no FireWire, and it can come with 32 GB, but it'll cost extra. The iPad also has a 1024x768 screen, just like my six year old laptop.

The iPad, however, does not have a replaceable hard drive. It does not have an expandable RAM slot. It does not have the ability to run two, or three, or five applications side-by-side. You can get a keyboard for it, but that will cost extra. You can not change its operating system, unless Apple does it for you. You can not change its battery, unless Apple does it for you. You can not install any applications on it that Apple hasn't told you that you can install on it. The iPad is six years newer than my laptop, and in all that time, the greatest advancement in computational hardware that anybody can claim the iPad has over a mid-range laptop from 2004… is a faster wireless card.

Excuse me if I don't start to foam at the mouth at this $500 insult to Moore's Law.

A short story what I did for class Wednesday

The Dark

Neither of them could see a thing.  There was hardly any room to move, and zero light.  In spite of that, both could tell that they were tethered to the walls, possibly to each other?  It didn’t matter.  They were stuck there with no hope of escape.

It seemed whoever had done this to them was a sadist, at the least.  Apart from being tied down, their bodies had so little freedom of motion that they typically remained with their hands fixed on their knees.  Sometimes, the stillness sat on their muscles to the point of agony, and one of them would thrash his legs for a few seconds if only to try and appease his nerves.  They were fed at irregular intervals; sometimes the meals came almost immediately after the other, sometimes they had to wait half a day before they got anything.

Mostly, though, what consumed them were the intense, vivid effects of their sensory deprivation: illusions, shadows, visions... sometimes they felt even like other peoples’ memories were treating their minds like a premium vacation getaway.

Both of them had long since given up hope of escape.  Even if they could get out, either one of them knew he had no idea where he’d go, what he’d do, or if there was even a life still waiting for him on the other side.  Besides, they were both naked, wet, and all but completely feeble from their stasis.

It seemed like whoever put them in this place wanted them to hate each other.  Every subtle movement one of them made, the other one felt.  One couldn’t even turn his head without rubbing against the other.  Their worst hells were an inch away from them every second of the day.

“I hate you,” one of them said.

“I hate you more,” the other shot back.

That was the most either said for a while, and then one asked, because the sound was better than the silence, “How long have you been here?”

“I don’t know,” the other replied.  “I don’t think more than a few months, counting the meals.”  He was completely guessing; even if the people keeping them there were benevolent  enough to feed them three times a day, every day, he’d lost count long ago of the number of times he’d gotten food.

“It feels like I’ve been here forever... what’s your name?”  The first asked.

“Why the hell do you care?”

“I was just wondering if you had one, alright?  At least something to attach humanity to either of us.”

The one hadn’t thought of that.  He honestly didn’t know what his name might have been, but figured he should give his cellmate an answer.  “Gene.”

“Gene, huh?  Call me Ted.”

“Great.  So glad I finally know how to address the most annoying thing ever.  Are we best friends yet?”

“Alright, fine.  If you don’t want to talk, we can just go back to the hallucinations,” Ted said.  Gene was completely silent for a couple of seconds, then groaned in exasperation.  “Fine, what do you want to know?”

Ted rolled the thoughts in his brain around until a question fell out, “Do you remember anything before this?”

“I don’t know,” Gene replied.  “I guess, maybe.  But it’s hard to say.”

“I remember things, but I don’t know if they really happened.  There’s a lot of guns, bombs, people dying.  Murders, monsters bigger than trees, and a lot of red – I don’t want to see any more of that,” Ted confessed.

“I haven’t had anything like that,” Gene said.  “I can understand why you’d want to talk... did you do any of that?”

“I don’t know.  I really hope not.”  Ted had wondered before if the blood spilled in any of the things he’d seen was on his hands.  Maybe it was why he was here now.

“I see people, but there’s usually not red.  People watching men run a ball up and down a field, a woman vomiting once or twice, men hugging, men kissing, men —” Gene trailed off, then slowly said, “There’s never men kissing women.”

Ted considered that.  “I wonder what that means.”

Gene was going to say something more, but with as much warning as a car gives before it tears out of a back alley, Ted was ejected from the room by some force neither of them had known was even there.  The tactile sensation of the experience only worked to heighten the point that he was now alone.

"Ted?" Gene paused, “Ted?”  Ted wasn’t getting back to him.  Gene waited, but nothing more happened.

For about a minute, the feeling manifested itself as solitude.  But then the empty space began to itch at him.  The air felt arid.  The thoughts in his head churned thick and slow like curdling milk.  Where did Ted go?  Who took him away?  Is he dead now?  Is he worse than dead?  But most importantly, what was going to happen to Gene now?

Something like a hand wrapped around Gene’s feet, and slowly Gene felt it creep up his body like strangling vines.  And then Gene felt himself being pressed down to meet the pit.

“What’s happening?  Ted?  What’s going on?”  Gene’s pulse elevated as the chasm slowly opened to swallow him.  There was nowhere he could turn to get out, the walls began pressing in on him, as if claustrophobia were a malevolent spirit seeking revenge on him.

He sank further and further, and the walls continued to collapse around him.  Thoughts barreled through his head faster than he could sort them out.  His heart beat in tempo with the thoughts and the frenzy within him made him want to fight, but the only thing still outside of the maw was his head.  He wanted to scream but he couldn’t.

And after what felt like an eternity of this panicked state his entire body was constricted by the walls of the tunnel.  The pressure on and in his body was unbearable.  There was nothing he could do, and the images he’d seen all before were bullets firing through his brain.  The people, the places, the events; surely they were his sins, surely this was his judgment.  He was being consumed by the transgressions he’d brought upon the others in his life.  Hell had literally begun to swallow him.

His feet were engulfed by a devastating cold.  In the matter of an instant, it felt like they were being assaulted with frostbite, and the cold, like the pit, crept up Gene’s body, one extreme to another.

All thought had began expelling itself from Gene’s mind.  The only things he could concentrate on were the sensations, torturing him.  One by one, each of the memories he’d been given passed back through his mind and then flew away from his conscious mind on angel’s wings.  Then his memory of the place itself, the walls, and the one he’d shared the horror with; each one suddenly eradicated by the trauma of the motion.

Surrounded by a cold he’d never known before, Gene could do only one thing: cry.  A hand he couldn’t see cut him free of his tether; the world was a shroud of white light, a colossus stood over Gene as he continued his wails.

A pair of giant hands wrapped a blanket around Gene, and then rocked him for a moment until the fear, pain, and cold were as faraway as the dark room.

Somewhere, a voice said, as Gene quieted, “Congratulations, ma’am,” and Gene slept.

New blog design

I know I haven't updated this blog in a good long while with anything meaningful, but nothing in this world has too much meaning, so EFF YOU.

I'm sorry, that was uncalled for.  Anyway, this is just to point out what you've already noticed: this blog has taken on a new design.  It has some eccentricities, for example, my tags totally had to go because of how far down my posts extended from it.  Anyway, I think it's pretty stylin', but I might be wrong.  Anybody have more elaborate thoughts?

A short poem

The paper ball
Unfurled
To reveal such
An intricate
Web
Of snot.

An update too long for Twitter or Facebook.

I discovered today that I'm getting a D in two of my classes. Normally, this is a very bad thing in college, because it means you have too little will to do what you think you want in life in order to actually get anywhere, except that the classes in which I'm performing remedially are about medieval England and oil wells – two subjects which, if I had to be told I could never ever learn about for the rest of my life, I wouldn't particularly miss. The unfortunate business is that these will drive down my GPA and can potentially force me out of my major. And suddenly the irony of liberal arts education becomes blaringly clear.

Anyway, maybe it's not too late to declare pass/fail.

What I'm working out to these days

This playlist is called "Nerdrenaline" because it's derived (with the exception of Samson and Delilah) completely from video games. Despite that, it's all very pumped stuff and has a pretty solid lifting tempo.

3 Cans Later - Chris Geehan - Iji
Welcome To the Party, Pal
For Stronger Bones
Seven Four
Tor
Face to Face - Tom Mauritzon - Iji
Hero (Wretched8 Remix) - Captain Goodnight - Iji
Further (Lifeforce cover) - VNV Nation - Iji
Mega Man 3: Magnet Man and Top Man - Entertainment System
Escape From The City - Jun Senoue - Sonic Adventure 2
Samson and Delilah - Shirley Manson - Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Jackknife - Solar Winds - Mirror's Edge
Ropeburn
Pirandello Kruger
Boat
Fighting For Freedom - Takehiru Ishimoto - The World Ends With You
Shibuya
Kinetic Harvest- Sidhe - Shatter
Aurora
Granular Extractor
Krypton Garden
Amethyst Caverns
Neon Mines
Xenon Home World
Boss Music

Enjoy.

Conundrum

Why is it that we stop caring what time it is only after it's already gotten ridiculously late? I wanted to get to bed forty minutes ago but I didn't, and now I don't want to go to bed even though I really should.

I'm renaming my internal clock Keyser Soze.

Hey life... ya done yet?

Cute. What are you looking for?

Mostly friends, but play's alright every once in a while. I'm open-minded in that area. How about you?

I don't "play," and I avoid those who do. It's not my thing.

Well, those who play tend to avoid me, but ... so does anyone I wish would just date me. So I guess that's that?

I don't hook-up, and I keep clear of those who do. It says a lot about one's character -- or lack thereof.

Yep, there's that final bullet to my self-esteem. Time to listen to Death Cab and concede that 2006 was, in fact, the last year I'd ever have a boyfriend.

I do think you're cute.

Cute but poisonous.

Ok, well take care and good luck finding whatever/whomever you're looking for. So long!

You know what I'm honestly looking for? I want to find a guy who's stuck in the years when Pete and Pete and Are You Afraid of the Dark were still on Nickelodeon. I'm looking for a guy who still has anxiety before he gets onto the big rollercoasters at the theme parks. I'm looking for a guy who remembers what the Super Nintendo was and who will still fight to say it was better than the Sega Genesis even though they both died off 14 years ago. I want somebody who hasn't quite grown up and isn't even sure he wants to.

 

And to be completely honest, I only mentioned play fleetingly because I had no idea what you might be looking to find on ******. I guess it was just my turn to get caught in a sting.

next time, be honest. you never know who's on the other end. don't tell someone what you "think" he wants to hear because in the end, it might not be what he wants to hear after all.

g'nite.

You'll have to forgive me if I'm not completely gracious toward your pious lesson. I'm honest as often as I can be and it hasn't won me any gratitude, sympathy, or love. And as high on your pedestal as you are, I'm sure it's tough for you to see me crying myself to sleep more nights than most people should.

Douche bag.

Sent from my iPhone

You call me a douche bag when you don't even know my name? I've spent the first year and a half of college shattered over the first guy in my life who's ever been fully compassionate toward me leaving, and I spent the next year and a half trying to recollect myself AGAIN after finally meeting somebody else that I clicked with. I have been spit upon and ignored my entire life by the people who were supposed to be my friends, and by the people who call themselves my family. So yes, sometimes I cave in and go for the opportunity to have a little closeness in my life.

 

Fine, maybe that makes me damaged, but I am not, nor will you ever have the right to call me, a douche bag.

Author's note: fuck...

Dear Madam Gaga

In order for something to be an innuendo, it must first be a real thing.  This is in reference to the term "Disco Stick."  There is no such thing as a disco stick.  There has never been a prevalence of sticks in disco culture.  I formally declare that your lyrics are stupid.

Sincerely,
The Undersigned.

Sending out an S.O.S.

I got off of Skype with a friend and started hearing a squeaking in my earbuds. I didn't know what might be the cause, so I didn't know what I should do. Then I started hearing a pattern to the squeaks. They're pulses. They come in clusters separated by about five seconds of silence and groups separated by about one second of silence. I've read about codes like this before in one of my math classes, but it doesn't make any sense to me.

3-2-2
2-2-3
3-3-2
3-2-2
2-2-2-1
1-2
2-1
1-1-1
1-1-4-1
1-1-1-1-1
This cluster is singled out because it doesn't follow the rule of the numbers adding up to 7, 8, or 9.
5-2-1
3-2-2
2-2-2-1
4-2-2
2-2-2-1
2-2-2-1
2-2-2-1
2-2-2-1
2-3-1-1
3-1-2-1
2-1-2-2
2-2-2-1
3-2-1-1
3-3-2
3-3-2
4-3-1
3-4-1
3-3-2
2-3-3
5-3
3-3-2
2-2-2-1
3-2-2
2-2-2-1
3-2-2
5-3
6-3
2-2-2-1
2-2-2-1
2-2-2-1
2-3-2
3-3-2
3-2-2
3-3-2
3-2-1-1

I lost track of them after this point, but they kept going. A friend of mine suggested I restart to see if it was a hardware glitch. So I did, and they stopped, but only after I completed the login sequence.

If anyone knows what sort of code this was, or what sort of code it resembles, can you give me a shout?

Random thought of the night

I've never been skinny dipping.  I wonder how it feels.  I was always afraid to take the risk, but what's the risk, really?  Can someone tell me?

Blue morning, blue morning, wrapped in strands of fist and bone

I made a new friend recently.  We haven't talked very often, but we've generally talked about things that are a little deeper than surface.  

Tonight, I shared a post from this blog with him, and he asked me if I still feel the way I did when I wrote it.  I said I do, and then told him that I use the stars as a frame of reference for times like these.  See, the stars are fixed in the sky, so compared to them, it's hard to say we're really moving at all.  He suggested that I should probably change my reference point if that's not how I wanted to feel.  He said that it was important that I be who I feel I am on the inside, no matter what others' opinion of my doing so is.

And the whole thing reminded me a lot of Counting Crows...

"Curiosity, kitten,
Doesn't have to mean youre on your own
You can look outside your window
He doesn't have to know
We can talk awhile, baby
We can take it nice and slow"

And a little later,

"There's a bird that nests inside you
Sleeping underneath your skin
When you open up your wings to speak
I wish you'd let me in"

Of course, I'd always heard "bird that nests" as "perfectness," but either image leads to the wings, and to not having to wander in solitude.  If I don't want to live my life closed off from everyone, I shouldn't have to.  And if I want to feel like I'm going somewhere, all I have to do is go somewhere.

My new reference point... I think it should be how much I've learned about life.

Whoops

I meant to write last night but I ended up not. I'll make up for it today.

I think that there are definite signs to be heeded in our daily lives. They can be little things that we don't even realize we're supposed to notice, they can be big things so big that we lose the message of them in the shock of the event happening. Usually they're hidden in the details, and can take a small amount of imagination to uncover. Some people will argue that they don't exist then, but I think that those people choose not to see signs because it's easier to live life without turning your head and looking around. (to their credit, they're right; it is easier to live that way)

It happens often, though, if you're receptive to it. The present structure of the signs tells me that whatever I'm hoping for this summer, it won't happen now. If I try to force the point, it'll just crash in on me.

I want to believe that these signs promise something will develop with the guy that apologized... but that's a very long way out and I shouldn't let my heart beat for a moment that might not ever come.

Tech 'n Talk

I'm waiting for a lot of things. I'm waiting for summer to be over, I'm waiting for love to find me, I'm waiting for my sister to get out of the shower, and I'm waiting for my real life to begin.

Well, in no more than an estimated 12 hours, I can cross one of the things I've been waiting for off my list. It's been about a year since the last major update to the iPhone OS, and soon Apple will be releasing their next big update: iPhone OS 3.0.

This is really exciting for anybody with an iPhone or iPod Touch because it adds a ton of functionality to the device. The majority of the upgrades are technical features, but they allow for pretty exciting stuff. Push notifications, for instance, allow applications to send updates to your device when there's new content available without the need for that application to be running.

Another huge feature is the ability to cut, copy, and paste text not only within individual apps, but across every app on your device. Got a link in Safari you want to share in Twitter? Done. Got an address you need to send to your dumb friend Gina because she lost the directions to the party? Done. Got a... thing that... needs pasting into... something else? ._.

In other news, my mom called a family discussion about cars and such and the topic arose that the car I used to have was supposed to be my graduation present, given to me a bit earlier than normal. I asked about if my parents had put any thought into what my sister's college graduation present would be, and then made the point that my high school graduation present was a lot smaller than my sister's, so I just wanted to know what hers would be like. My mom contested that my high school graduation present was a laptop and not a $300 MP3 player. I corrected her on this point and made it clear that my graduation present was some $800 than my sister's. After dinner she hugged me, apologized (apologies abound these past ten days), and then said she knew what I meant on the walk last night.

Two humanized people in ten days. Maybe this summer is turning out differently than the last two. Even if just in small amounts, it makes me hopeful for the rest.

What I did today.

I woke up at noon and then hung out downtown with a friend from high school. We had Panera Bread around 4:30 because I was starving. I had the chipotlé chicken sandwich with no tomato or cheddar. I also had the iced green tea and made a point to ask the girl if there was any dairy in this green tea. Stupid question, I know, but sometimes people put milk in green tea. She said there was no dairy in the green tea, so I was golden. The sandwich was delicious, but shortly after eating it I discovered that there was indeed milk in the chipotlé sauce. I don't regret anything.

I got home around 6:30, and logged on to my computer, was bored to tears until about 12:00, when I started watching a web series called Dorm Life. It's interesting; sort of like The Office if it were set in a college dorm and hopped up on guarana.

Now I'm heading to bed, woot. Goodnight.

EDIT: oh, speaking of woot, I bought a 4GB flash drive off of woot.com today. It was $10 after shipping.

I feel really attuned to this image

It all started when I got an email from Blizzard...

They were informing me of a successful character transfer. It was an interesting email to have received, because I haven't played WoW in over a year.

Concerned about whether or not this might reflect on my bank statement, I attempted to log on to worldofwarcraft.com. Indeed, I was unable to log in, so I reset my password by answering my security question, and changed my default email address. And then I looked at my payment summary: Somebody purchased a month, on May 28th. I looked, then, to the subscription plans, which were indeed set to a monthly basis. The good news is that the month was not purchased on my plastic.

Still, mildly concerned about this character transfer business, I called Blizzard support. They told me that my account was hacked. And that there's nothing they can do over the phone about the character transfer.

But...

They did say that I should check my computer for viruses and keyloggers and trojans.

So I did check my Mac for those things...

And found none of those things.

Then, curious to see what else my hacker might have done, I decided to download WoW back on to my computer. The initial download promised to be 6.5 GB. I come back to my computer a little while later, to find that the 11 GB of free space I had left it with... Were all gone. I cleared off my hard drive, and redownloaded. Then I successfully had version 3.0.1. Then the downloader came up. And then the updater came up. And the download/update dance repeated, nine times, until finally, I was able to click "Play" on the launcher.

So I did.

And I signed in.

And was prompted to update, three more times.

But when finally granted the go-ahead to log in and run the actual game, it appeared that it was all for naught.

You see, on the very first installer screen, some eight hours ago, I chose Wrath of the Lich King. Thinking that installing that would let me play my basic account, since they all contain the same data anyway. Apparently... I was wrong. I installed the wrong kind of 15 gigabytes. You know how it takes up that much space? They never optimize their code. Their patches are installed next to one another. Never overwriting the precious base code of the other patches.

You would think, that with all of Blizzard's money and vast nebulous brainsize hive mind knowledge of making the most incredibly immersive video game experiences known to all of mankind, nay, all of Creation, that they would know how to make a unified installer. I was told that my account information was wrong. Back to the website to enter in the same account information. Which was proven on the website to be right.

So now I sit, downloading the right kind of 15 gigabytes. With luck, I'll wake up tomorrow and update three more times before finding out what my hacker had done.

In the meantime, I find it necessary to ask: if WoW were a standalone OS, would Microsoft finally look efficient?