I'm back. I suppose I should update this, eh? Hi.

The trip was good, I'm thirty now, woo. The plane travel experiences were not good on either end. I'm still kinda jet lagged and cranky.

My niece and nephew rock. Beer in Holland is good. Mvsevms in Holland are good. Rijstafel in Holland is good. My sister is good. Being farther away from Florida for a while is good.

More later.

link (29 nov)

Dear People of Earth:

Please stop forwarding me that damned email about the Queen revoking our independence. It was only marginally funny the first time.

Yours,

Fedward

link (15 nov)

In eighteen or so hours, I'll be boarding a plane bound for Amsterdam. In about twenty-six hours I'll wend my way through a foreign airport (albeit one that conveniently has everything labeled in English as well as Dutch) and find a train to the central station. About an hour after that I'll get on a bus. And then about a half hour after I get on the bus, I'll walk a few blocks.

And I'll watch my sister give a beginning computer course to a bunch of expat neophytes and try not to get sucked in. I don't know if she's going to tell them that I work with computers for a living. I suspect she'll try to enlist me, as she could use my help, and I know if she asks I'll help.

Maybe I'll find my niece and give her the crayons and coloring book I'm taking, give her a Dum-Dum (evil, candy-bearing, bad influence uncle that I am) and keep her busy so her mom can't keep me busy instead.

Anyway, I'm gonna be in the Netherlands for a couple weeks, returning the Monday after Thanksgiving. I'm taking pumpkin pie filling. You know, I was distraught when I discovered it no longer says Libby Libby Libby on the label label label (only one Libby® logo on the label now) but what can you do.

The weather forecast for Haarlem cracks me up. As Truman Capote said of Southern California, that's not weather, it's climate. 'Cept in Holland the climate isn't as nice as the one in SoCal.

So if I don't update, you know why. They have to pay by the minute over there. The horror! The horror!

link (15 nov)

Two things.

Thing one: I bought Kid A last night. I like it quite a bit. So if you don't, I'm right and you're wrong, neener neener. But then I'm sort of afraid of OK Computer since I realized that everyone compares it to Dark Side of the Moon, and when was the last time you listened to that? I like OK Computer quite a bit but the album that turned me onto Radiohead was The Bends and that's the one I listen to most. It's in my car now (again) as a matter of fact. I even listen to Pablo Honey some, but it's not quite all there, like the other ones are.

Thing two: I talked to my (now former) manager's manager today, and he did nothing that allayed my concerns that the company as a whole would fail to compensate me adequately and timely for good work done. I didn't tell him I was going to look for another job right away (I'm not) but I did effectively write on the wall what point I'd be looking for something, and if he fails to respond at that point then he will have lost this game of chicken.

link (13 nov)

This is how my morning started:

Pedal pedal pedal swerve road pedal pedal pedal swerve sidewalk pedal pedal pedal swerve road pedal pedal pedal swerve sidew-w-w-w-wh-WHAM!

When you're on a bicycle trying to go up a driveway ramp to get onto the sidewalk, and you're mostly oblique to the ramp, and you don't see that the ramp has a lip which is raised about an inch above the level of the road, your tires will not behave in the same manner they would if any one of those things were not true. The sad thing here is, I was trying to get out of traffic and onto the sidewalk out of harm's way. Casualties:

• Knee, right (bruised and raw, but not skinned)
• Tail light, blinky (cheap enough to be a total loss)
• Knuckles, right pinky and ring finger (skinned)
• Glove, right
• Pride

One jean leg looked a bit dirty, and my shirt hardly showed signs at all. And if you're wondering, I actually fell on the driveway ramp/sidewalk and not the road. One nice woman driving by stopped to see if I was okay. I was mostly disgusted at that turn of events but unharmed, so I waved her off. Hopped back on the bike and continued my ride.

Crystal City is slightly farther than I was thinking it was. Including the wipeout, the ride took about 40 minutes. I was expecting it to take no more than 30.

I was riding to Crystal City to attend the one-day "Presenting Data and Information" course presented by Edward Tufte. If he comes to your city and you haven't seen him, by all means go. It's 320 bucks, but that includes copies of all three of his books and a poster of the Minard map/diagram of Napoleon's army's march to and retreat from Moscow (altogether worth about $150), so the lecture itself is then $170 and worth it. Plus you can get discounts on the books there, so I finished out my original set of three. I'll probably give a set to my sister for Christmas.

I'd planned to get there about ten or fifteen minutes early, but instead got there only one minute before the beginning of the lecture and had to get a seat, still all sweaty from the ride, as he started.

It was fascinating. He's a good lecturer, uses visual aids well (as you'd expect), and he fills the time very well. It seems about 15% commercial for himself, but I can excuse that because he's written the best texts in the field. He can't be blamed for using them as material during the lecture.

The ride home was rainy and traffic-filled, but uneventful. I came home and got naked just so I could dry off. I totally understand why bicycle clothing exists, so I guess it's not very sensible of me not to own any. I at least need to replace the padded shorts that died a couple years ago. Cotton and bicycling don't really mix.

link (9 nov)

Nineteen years ago to the hour, I received the worst news of my life. I was ten, three weeks shy of my eleventh birthday. I was singing in the Tulsa Boy Singers, and after rehearsal had ridden with the usual carpool back to the usual grocery store parking lot (It's a Bud's Family Foods now), only to find that nobody was there to pick me up. Then my sister got out of a car I didn't recognize (a white Cadillac de Ville), and I, confused, went with her. She didn't know what was going on either. Or maybe she did, but I think mom and dad had "protected" her up to that point.

Anyway, we rode home in the foreign Cadillac (sorry mom, but I didn't have any idea who Mrs. Luthey was, even if I had met her, and I don't think I ever had), and found mom and dad sitting in a chair nobody ever sat in, in the living room nobody ever used except for the piano and the once a year Christmas tree. Something was very wrong.

And so, around 10pm central on a Wednesday, my parents sat us both in their laps and told us that Mark -- our brother, our closest relative, a month shy of his twentieth birthday -- had been killed in a car accident that afternoon.

There are many things I don't understand about the way parents raise their children, like the way my mom asked me if I'd moved to the front of the classroom when I told her I couldn't read the blackboard despite the fact that everybody in the family wore glasses already. I can place at the top of that list this question: why, when my brother was killed around 2:45, did my parents not pick me up from school or rehearsal as soon as they knew? Why did they let it wait?

In the days that followed, dad hid any newspaper articles that referred to the accident. I know it made the front of the City/State section, above the fold, but I never saw the articles. Mark and his friend Danny, who was driving, had been at the top of their high school class two years before. Tulsa is still a small enough place that this sort of story resounds -- stark contrast to Washington, where only the most shocking deaths are reported, and then only rarely. There was a similar tragedy last year, and somebody at the paper who knew Mark (and Emily) called mom and asked if she'd be willing to do an interview. She was. They didn't tell her they were going to lead with her.

After that article ran, I thought about writing an essay and sending it to the same editor who thought to call mom, about what it's like to be the little brother and not the parent, but I wasn't sure I actually had anything to say that would help and not be controversial.

The conventional wisdom, especially in a bible belt place like Tulsa, is that something like this is "God's Will." I guess maybe for some people that explains it. Not me. Mom had grown up a Southern Baptist, but both my parents got tired of the politics involved in going to church. So by the time I came along we weren't a church-going family, and by extension not a religious one either.

So, take an almost eleven-year-old kid who's already too smart for his own good, have his only church experiences be weddings he's sung in or the funeral of his grandfather (a grumpy old man of whom he wasn't fond, and in an unairconditioned church a long drive away), take away the person closest to him in the world -- who taught him to read, taught him multiplication tables, started him playing piano, talked mom and dad into letting him audition for the Boy Singers, et cetera -- and then tell him it's "God's Will." See how far it gets you. And God, whoever he is.

Take away the person who stood in for the father who worked too much, and put in his place the actual father, who has trouble dealing with emotion (that grumpy old grandfather? Dad didn't like him all that much either) and who has missed most of his youngest son's life so far since he was spending so much time at the office. See where that gets you, too. For added measure, have him tell that youngest son on the night after that he's going to take a belt to said youngest son if he doesn't buck up and stop crying.

(I won't say that my family was dysfunctional, and I won't say that I hate my father, because I don't. I will say that he never could deal with me until I was getting ready to graduate from college and he suddenly realized that I'd become an adult, and he could deal with me on that level. Relations between us became a whole lot better once he admitted I could take care of myself. I was 23.)

So. Telling that kid that it was "God's Will" was the wrong thing to do. Threatening him with a belt was the wrong thing to do. So he did what any sensible kid would do -- he withdrew into himself.

I think that's actually where my cynicism started. By that point I'd already figured out that public school wasn't built for smart people, but my attitude hadn't yet been soured on the general public. Having a bunch of people (many of whom I barely knew) in the house all day, trying to make sure I was okay, and reassuring me again with the God's Will crap, got me to stop talking better than anything else possibly could. I sat in front of the TV all day Thursday, eating all the Rice Krispie treats and peanut butter cookies on the food trays people brought, and generally trying to avoid talking to anybody. I was a sullen teenager three years early. The mass of people in the house made me really uncomfortable, and I decided to go to school on Friday, if only to get out of the house. So I went. I was in shock all day, but I went, and I didn't go home early.

I'd been big into the Legos (yes, I know it's a trademark and it's LEGO, but this is my story here), and that was something I could do by myself while I thought this whole death thing through, so that weekend I conceived and built my most elaborate project to date: a castle, with city walls and gates, big guard tower, stables, the works. Aside from the funeral itself, that's how I spent the weekend. That's how I learned to deal. Nobody else could possibly tell me anything that would help, but they wouldn't shut up. But I could close my door and sort through the Legos and figure out how I was going to find enough pieces to put a roof on the stable, and they'd leave me for the most part alone.

Mark had a picture cut out of a newspaper pinned to a board in his room. It was of a squirrel clinging to the side of a tree, taken somewhere on the TU campus. His services were at Sharp Chapel, on campus. As we left, mom and I spied a squirrel clinging to a tree in front of the chapel. The squirrel seemed to stop in that spot, making sure that we saw him before he hurried up into the tree. "He's okay," the squirrel seemed to say.

I didn't really talk much to people during the next year or two after that. I was afraid that any conversation would reopen the wounds. I didn't trust anybody I hadn't known before the wreck. Eventually I realized I didn't like the person I'd become, so I decided to become somebody else. And I did, mostly. But that kid with the scars is still there, hidden underneath the rest.

In January of 95, my sister got married. About halfway into the service, I recognized the chapel as where Mark's funeral had been. One friend of Patrick's saw me burst into tears, but assumed that I was just moved by the wedding, and I didn't bother to correct him. Since I was singing in the wedding, I was in a chair over along one wall, so I don't think anybody else actually saw me overcome by emotion. In that five minutes, I had to reconcile that place with the worst and best times of my life. I guess maybe that's easier for people who go there more frequently. For me, the contrast was striking.

It's nineteen years later. I'll be 30 in a couple weeks. Most days I can talk about Mark without breaking out in tears. When people ask me if I have any brothers or sisters, I tell them about Emily, and that I had an older brother who was killed in a car accident. They're sorry. It's okay, I tell them. It's been a long time.

I haven't been by to see his niche in a couple years. The letters in his name -- all the marker you get on the wall -- are crooked. There's no place to leave flowers. Eventually mom and dad will be in adjacent niches. The columbarium overlooks a little pond, and is mostly sheltered from traffic noise from the two six lane roads that intersect at the corner of the cemetary. It's not my favorite place. It has dignity, I guess, but it's creepy.

The tough thing here is, I never did figure out the death thing. For months afterward, I'd lie in bed expecting Mark to come into the room, and we'd just pick up where we left off. I still don't get it. Death is not fair. Death is only fair if the Reaper can look you in the eye, and then only if you can respond, "it's a fair cop." A cement truck broad-siding a VW Beetle containing two brilliant young men is not fair. I don't want any part of a religion that believes in a God capable of that.

Nineteen years ago today, my brother's life was cut short. If there's a reason for everything, I still haven't found the reason for that.

link (4 nov)

Unrelated to that last entry, and on a more serious note, tonight's Astrogirl reminded me that I'd just had a similar thought to hers.

Don't vote the lesser of two evils. Don't not vote. Go vote, and vote your heart and mind. If you believe in Woody or Shrub, by all means go vote for them, but don't vote for one of them because you think he'll do the least harm.

The system isn't going to get changed until it's shown not to work. It's most likely that whichever one of them "wins" the election will do so without a majority of the popular vote (Clinton didn't have a majority in either '92 or '96). The Electoral College is built so that there's always a clear "winner" in a contest such as this. The problem here is that neither one of the two major party candidates has the support of half the people (who bother to vote) in the country. We have to choose from this?

The reaction in recent elections has been that an ever smaller percentage of the electorate actually vote. So the "winner" will receive the support of less than half of half of the people who have a say (that's less than a quarter of eligible voters, in other words). The rest can't be bothered to vote either way. This is why it's important to realize that voting for a candidate you believe in isn't throwing your vote away at all.

If enough of the disaffected vote their hearts, the Electoral College as we know it will cease to exist as of that election. If the Electoral College fails to nominate a President (if no candidate accumulates a simple majority of Electors), the vote devolves to the House of Representatives, which is sure to vote on party lines -- quite possibly not representing the will of the people at all. Scandal will ensue. If a third party candidate carries a crucial state and the Electors bolt as a result, scandal will ensue.

I'm waiting for the day when neither major party candidate garners more votes than the third party candiates combined. That's a truer representation of the will of the people. Scandal will ensue then too.

link (2 nov)

New symptom for me: this early darkness is really freaking me out this year.

I like night. I like night much better than I like day, really. I have never been able to think until after dark. I don't know exactly why that is, other than the placative statement, "I'm not a morning person, I'm a night person," which doesn't say anything at all. People take it as an excuse, even if it is an explanation¹ for certain behaviors, and they ignore the larger issue since "not a morning person" equates with "freak."

Anyway, this total darkness before I leave work thing is actually bothering me now. It's even more disturbing since I like darkness. I like the stillness, the quiet. At night I can be inconspicuous. In the dark I can focus, become that infinitely hot and dense dot.

I always feel like an actor around people. I have a compulsion to fill time and space, to become a larger version of myself, to perform the role of me. I don't know why this is, because it doesn't jive at all with my self image. I'm very comfortable with who I am, and I'm not at all insecure, but only when I'm in control of the room. If I have to live up to somebody else's expectations, I flail, waiting for some sign that I'm doing it right. If I'm in charge, if I'm the one setting my expectations, this does not happen. The shift between these two states is not conscious for me, but people who've only seen me in the one are always shocked (sometimes moved) when they see the other.

So the night is my time. I'm the one asking me to do things, and I know what I want.

I've never been able to relate to people with SAD, because longer nights have always had a positive effect on me. I understand SAD, I just don't relate to it. But now it seems the darkness is affecting me negatively, and that's new, strange, and disturbing.

I suspect it may be that I can't reconcile the darkness, which is my time, with work, which isn't. I think the unsettling factor is that work is intruding on my personal time and space. I look out the window and see the cue that I'm supposed to be doing me things, having me thoughts, and instead I'm still in a cube staring at a computer, and I still have an hour commute before I can actually have that me time I need.

I need my time, my darkness. I need to think.

 

 

 

 

1) If I'm late for something which I feel deserved my promptness and I didn't manage to live up to that expectation, I feel compelled to explain why it is I failed. People hear this as an excuse -- that I'm blaming my lateness on the thing -- instead of an explanation, which to me is backstory without the attribution of blame. If I fuck up I'll take the heat, even if I reflexively think you should hear why I did it.

link (2 nov)

Look! Something shiny!

I pulled out the laptop and figured I'd see if I could fix some compatibility problems so I'd be able to use it on the plane when I fly to Holland in a couple weeks. First step was to check for Windows 2000 compatibility for Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (good golly, is it a time suck, but I haven't played it since I upgraded the laptop from 98 to 2K). I downloaded an update from M$ that's supposed to make it work. I haven't yet tried to install the game, so we'll see.

The second step was to check on what was wrong with the DVD player. When we'd gone to Raleigh/Durham for Amber's wedding, I'd brought along the DVD of Fargo that I'd borrowed from Amanda (just so I could give it back), and popped it into the drive to see if the DVD software actually worked under 2K. The video looked fine, but there was this constant clicking noise coming over the speakers, so I figured DVDs would be a loss that weekend and didn't pursue the problem. Tonight I figured I'd pursue it (the in-flight movies are Gladiator on the way out (which I might actually watch), and The Patriot and Frequency on the way back (feh)), since I can presumably download drivers and software easily over the DSL, and not so easily over the Atlantic. So I popped in the nearest DVD, Run Lola Run, in order to test it.

It worked fine.

I got sucked in. Again.

I'm glad I bought it, but I can't press Play without ending up watching the whole movie. It's that compelling.

So here I am approx. 80 minutes later, having done nothing to fix the DVD software. And this time it just works, possibly as a side effect of my near-fatal error earlier today.

I was trying to get the Visor software installed so I could actually sync up at work again (lost that capability with the W2K upgrade), and couldn't get the system to install the driver as a USB device. So I was looking around in the Device Manager, and I deleted an "Unknown Device."

The system promptly went to hell. It lost the display driver, (luckily, the external monitor worked), then it farted and said that dependent devices had prevented that operation from happening, then it set about discovering all my devices all over again.

Then it said I needed to reboot. Then it did the device discovery all over again. Then it said I needed to reboot again. Then it discovered a couple more devices. Then it worked, strangely. And after that I got the Visor driver to install. I only lost about an hour doing all this.

Now as long as I don't look at the Hardware Wizard (it thinks I have three of most devices, and six of a few of them), I can go on believing that Windows 2000 works.

Now to try Alpha Centauri ...

link (1 nov)