I've decided that I need to see a psychologist, at least once to determine what, if anything, is wrong with me. I'm waiting to start until next semester since I'll be home for a while and really don't want to tell my mom that I'm going to seek professional help.

So then I started thinking, what makes it necessary for someone to seek help? When do you cross that boundary? I know I've crossed it a long time ago, but I'm not sure when.

  • I've been struggling off and on with your garden variety eating disorder since age 11.
  • Sometimes I play with scissors and razor blades on my legs.
  • The last time I felt truly rejected, I nearly drank myself to death.
  • I routinely lay in bed and cry for no reason.
  • The other night, the suicidal thoughts started.

I used to proud of being fucked up but now I'm just sick of it. I'd like to lead a normal life already.

Is it possible my friends and neighbors that if some poor dope somehow musters up the optimism in this dreary greedy dim age that has clearly been abandoned by all but the most spiteful or depraved Gods to wish you a merry motherfucking Christmas or Hanukkah or Ramadan or what have you, that we can just simply rejoice that anyone on this self righteous should have been dominated by dolphins asscrack of a planet can even bear to do that with a straight face?

I love each and every one of you backwards primitives with all of my heart.

To the kid I never met who I yelled at the other day at work via email and who told me to have a happy christmas and joyous (joyous no less) new year, you rock you bastard. To all the people who say thank you when someone holds the door for you bless you most of all. To all the hardliners and the fundamentalists and the closeminded out there, I give you big wet kisses you terrible sinners you, even if you mortally insult Jesus by twisting his words around I still love you . (I'm pretty sure Muhammed. Siddartha and any of those other cool cats ain't so impressed with you either) Who wants eggnog?

Happenings off E2

I'm developing a clone of Centipede for the NES. If you know 6502 assembly language or can draw convincing graphics in 8x8 pixels and three colors, /msg me.

Happenings on E2

Dammit, there was a fire drill while I was writing Frankenstein was the monster's name also The name Frankenstein, and I didn't get time to clarify the point (it's a surname) until after the New Writeups effect had passed.

Colin is now wearing an E2 shirt. On that same topic, I'm starting an E2 Coloring Book node-ring; if you want your ASCII art added, /msg me. Editor Log: June 28, 2001 tells why ascii-art for its own sake is no longer wanted here.

Jigglypuff song has been added to noding music. And now you can't get it out of your head.

Node of the day

cute language: I need input from the conlangers in the audience.
Yesterday I became a troll, and I am so ashamed.

In an experiment in "brutal honesty", I was successful in only being brutal. I said some hurtful things in the public forum of e2 about another noder and actually thought I was making a contribution. I was so stupid -- probably completely stupid.

I am deeply sorry to the e2 community for my stunningly poor lack of judgement.

That I'm allowed back here is testament to the beauty of everything2 and it's extraordinary community of people.

Today has been difficult, feeling horrid, hoping that my spectacular lack of tact will not return in a hurry.

7:30 am: An adjuster from State Farm arrives to look at two supplements that are under review. The first is a 1999 Mustang that was hit on the front end and now seems to need inner tie rod ends, bushings, and a new rim to make the squeaking noise heard when turning the steering wheel from side to side go away. It has been waiting in service for a few days for the rep to come in, since we can’t do any more work on it without State Farm’s authorization. Bobby, the alignment tech, gave me some attitude about putting the Mustang on a lift, saying he had more important shit to do. State Farm decided that the Mustang’s driver liked taking curbs a little too hard and compromised the assessment so that he would allow payment for about half of what I had originally asked for. I gave Bobby the go ahead and later on he apologized to me for giving me shit, saying that the service advisors had jumped on him from the moment he punched in and that he was just in a bad mood. After telling Bobby what was approved, we moved on to my other customer’s car. It was a 1996 Taurus that had been clipped pretty hard in the left fender but now, after all the body work was done, the Check Engine light stayed on and the turn signals wouldn’t work. After hooking the Taurus up to a computer to diagnose the problems, the service tech came up with about $800 in parts, labor and access time. Judging from the impact and the fact that the sensors that were blown were on the opposite side of the engine compartment, State Farm swiftly denied it as being accident related and blamed poor maintenance or warranty for the problem. In both cases, once the verdict was out, I called each owner and let them know what State Farm had decided. One guy was fine, the other was hiring a lawyer. You guess which was which.

10 am: Pulled an F150 into the wash bay, since our porter can’t drive stick and can’t drive at all really, so we don’t leave the keys in the cars he washes. Every time he’s moved a car, he’s hit something. He has autism and goes to the church where my boss is a pastor, so we’re stuck with him as a charity case. Once it was washed, I asked the paint shop to put the stripes back on the panels we painted, then I ordered a fender molding and stuck it on, since the body man who had initially been working on the truck was fired before it was finished. I had to practically beg another body man, Larry, to put the truck back together. We’d had the truck for almost 2 months by this point and it was driving me nuts how long it had taken to get done, since all the damage to it was undercarriage. It got a new oil pan, gearbox, the works. When Larry tried to put the rear bumper back on he said that the hitch plate was bent, but that it was not likely due to the wreck. So I ordered a hitch plate for him and stood over him while he put it on. Half my day is following behind body men, making sure they do what they said they would so I can get these cars back to their owners on the day I said they’d be ready.

1pm: Pull a Cougar in to get washed. After it was done, I drove it around to the front lot when I noticed that the Check Engine light was on this car as well. I drove it into service and told the advisor to call the customer to find out what rattling noise she was talking about that she heard after she rear ended someone. This woman was also claiming that she was hit so hard that her son’s bookbag flew from the back seat into the center armrest console and caused the lid of it to break off. Yeah, right.

1:30pm: Called the owner of a 95 Lincoln Towncar to update her on the repairs. She tells me that her husband had said something about damage to the rear end that was not related to the front end collision we were repairing, but she wasn’t sure what to do. I told her that we don’t work for free so she needed to call the insurance company and make a second claim, which would mean a second deductable she would have to pay when she picked it up.

2pm: A woman who’d had her Honda station wagon brought in to have the hatch replaced brought it back to me because the glass company who put in her new rear windshield set the rear wiper arm wrong. Instead of wiping the glass, it was wiping the bottom of her hatch. It was kind of funny. I remembered the day she picked it up because our porter was sick and I had to clean the car myself. They had whole, unshelled nuts and leaves in the footwells of their seats. Gross.

2:30pm: I have to drive a Mustang to a tire shop to have an alignment done because Bobby can’t do it. The specialty rim on this car, which were shipped to us from California, have no lip on them so the alignment machine’s clamps could fit. Tiffany followed me in my car so we could drop it off; we are still one porter short and he’s usually the guy who would do this so we can stay in our offices. The first tire shop we went to couldn’t do it, so we had to go to another one. Even though it was only a dozen or so block from the dealership, the construction on the streets and traffic stretched our errand to about an hour. The owner said that his Mustang had to be ready today. I thought maybe he should go back to California where he came from, but I kept that to myself.

3:30pm: Called service to see if anything had been done to the Cougar, which there hadn’t. Brought the Mustang from Bobby to the front lot for delivery. Paged the owner of the F150 for an update, but got no return call. Convinced a body man who speaks Spanish to call a customer of mine, who speaks no English, to relay a message from me that the parts for his 2000 Explorer Sport Track were in and that I would like him to come in as soon as possible.

4:30pm: Went back to the tire shop to get the Mustang. Tiffany drove it back and I followed her in my Festiva, joking with her that we should race.

5pm: Both Mustang owners were picking up after hours, so I parked them in the front lot where they would have access to them, leaving their keys with the night cashier in service. Filled the coffee machine for the next morning. Wrote a walk in estimate for the owner of a conversion van who wanted to have it painted gold and black because the Saints were having a good year. The estimate came to about $4000. I guess he will buy T-Shirts instead.

6pm: Lock up the paint and body shops, office doors and the lock box for the car keys. Drive home. Get online. Node.

So I may not have managed a new level on E2 (I had a vague idea of noding up lyrics all night until I did), but I did achieve a new level of geekdom. I slept around a day. And worse yet, I had absolutely no good, compelling reason to do it. I just felt like it. I woke up at 2PM Tuesday after waking up later and later each day leading up to that, and then in a vague effort to get back onto a schedule my parents might find minimally condemnable, I stayed up until 2PM Wednesday and slept until about 11PM. Right about the time my housemate was heading to bed.

So this isn’t all that stunning of an achievement, no, but it represented one more step down the dark path of becoming completely incomprehensible to normal society. And to think, back in the day I used to think I was a morning person. There goes that idea.

Yay!

That or I'm just acting out a reponse to a total rejection of having had to wake up at 8AM every day this bloody semester. Grr.

Today, I embark a node quest. I like to think that it's a particularly good quest, one that will transform me, transform my emotions and existence... and like all good quests, it has personal relevance to me...

child abuse.

The idea's been building up for a while, ever since I first got the chance to talk with WolfDaddy on AOL Instant Messenger a few weeks ago, and we discovered that we have similar feelings towards the world as it exists today. For example, there's an IRC channel called #gaydads4sons that exhibits something severely missing in our world... and we've not been able to pinpoint the exact reason why, or even what it is that's truly missing.

Oh dear! I vaguely remember Sarah Cox on Radio 1 then a news article about (sort of) finding Bigfoot in New York. Then... I sit bolt upright in bed and look at the clock. Oh dear once more. It's 9:50 and the alarm went off at 8:30. Oh dear oh dead oh dear. Oh well.
Get dressed and jumb (not a misspelling, I have a cold) on my bike, pedal like a bastard for 10 minutes to get to work.

Getting into work late hasn't seemed to make a difference. There is still no testing to be done.

In a very worrying development, I now find myself alternating between, say, Autechre and the cheesy Contemporary Christian music station on the way to and from work. This is shocking even to me, a nonrepentant music snob, and former hardcore Sartre-toting atheist. I've gone soft. I've sold out. There! I've admitted it! I'm a Christian! And I'm happy it's almost Christmas and I want to remind myself, after all these years, that there is a force of benevolence at the center of everything.

In my defense, I do admit switching over to The Orb or Richard H. Kirk when the cheese gets too thick. I may be a Christian, but I'm not an idiot.
today i didn't wake up in pain, but it came on ahortly after getting out of bed. it's disturbing. it comes on strong and sudden. on the right side of my abdomen, from nipple to just below the belly button. it isn't sharp jabs, but a very strong, constant ache that doubles me over. it lasts about 20 minutes then slowly dies down. the only way to get any relief is to lay face down with that area of my stomach on a firm pillow. but it's gone now, and i'm having my morning coffee.

this week and next are going to be busy. so busy that i've had to cancel christmas dinner with the Man's parents. i feel bad about that.

i've been given a cellular phone. i hate the things. actually, i suggested it myself because it's the right thing to do and will make my job a teeny bit easier over the next few weeks. buh (note to self: e-mail the man my phone number).
more later, time to do work.
Before my friends Adam and Cris married, they had considered having me officiate at their wedding. I was kind of disappointed when they chose to get married in Florence, Italy instead. -Not that I begrudge them! Anyway, Charles and Jean Ann have asked me do their wedding ceremony in February, so I will get to exercise my Reverend Powers in a truly official capacity yet. Adam and Cris just moved, I'm looking forward to their housewarming/holiday party Friday evening.
Received Debian 2.2 from cheap*bytes, to install on one of the 486s people keep giving me. Mom requested some Christmas gift suggestions, and I drew a blank - I used to keep a list of books and CD's I wanted, but I no longer desire to accumulate media. My flatmate decided to get me a PC DVD upgrade for Christmas, in appreciation for the extended loan of one of the cars, so I gave Mom a short list of movies worthy of periodic review.
Rented Naked Lunch, The Replacement Killers, End of Days, and Robocop over the past few days. I had forgotten how psycho Naked Lunch was - we smoked a little between That 70's Show and Naked Lunch, and the scene with Bill's lady friend shooting up bug powder in her breast made me feel horribly faint. Needles are why I will never be interested in heroin. End of Days had some suspense, killer f/x, and Robin Tunney (as eye candy, rather than any performance worth mention) going for it, but little else. The Replacement Killers would have been better with more plot surprises and less extended shoot-em-up footage, and maybe more mmm-Mira Sorvin-oh! stalking around in her underwear.
I'm pleased with the performance of the freeware Coffeecup Free FTP client. Transferred a heap of old game notes on Jaintuchen gods and saints to the computer; maybe I'll node 'em up sometime soon.

Was a boring day of stripping carpet so that they could put tile in. GRR!! It was so so so much work!! I HATE YOU!! Okay, calm down, calm down. Breathe. Okay, I'm good. I stayed up until 4:30 in the morning enthralled by the movie Titanic, I don't know why so many people hate it or bothered not to watch it. Hmm...

today was borin, so this will be short. the high point being, burning my FACKIN EYE WITH MALTEN METAL!!!!!..yes indeed it hurt. but shit happons.

and oh yeah, HAPPY XMAS EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!!

well this log is shit so it should fit in with the rest.

well....i go now........chow!!!!!!

*brr*, it's freezing in here.

In honour of the winter solstice, our central heating pump has just plain died.

Consequently, I now have two sources of heat in the room. One is the vents on top of the iMac, and that's somewhat impractical due to the fact that I can't use the computer for important things whilst using it to warm myself. This leaves me with a pair of power bricks to keep my feet from going numb. Not a great solution.

Other than that, I finished my Christmas shopping. Not a very eventful day, really..


Ah yes, how could I forget? I managed to completely piss my mum off. How? I attempted to delete Comic Sans from her computer at work.

She has taken to using it for business letters. Yes, you heard me, business letters. *Really* professional looking, dontcha think? She's asked me to print one of the files that was open, so I attempted to change it to something normal like Times New Roman before hitting print. She spotted me, and slapped my wrists for it..

This annoyed me a little, so I went and moved the font from the font folder, and she freaked at me for that. So I had to put it back.

What I have done now, though, is installed Palatino, and set it up as the default font in normal.dot. I wonder if it'll sway her?

quite a relaxing day today, nothing major happend. The whole family (aunts and uncles and grandmothers, all them) are still in shock over the confession that my wonderful cousin (you can almost feel the sarcasam)made a couple days ago. And that wonderful confession is....... shes pregnent. Now this could be good for lets say a 25 year old lady, but my cousin is only 17!!!. Okay so its not really any of my business, hey if you knew my cousin you would aggree! The only reason why i am caring is because she is seeing one of my best mates.

Now im just hoping to god that it is not this mate, i mean this mate is not stupid and i dont think for one minute it is his. Of course if it is then there is not a lot i can say, and so i wont say it. But the whole family is in complete shock over this and they every right to be like that. Me and my brother had just come in from the pub and the conversation started

dad:hi lads good job you werent here 5 minutes eariler!

Me:why?

dad:well your aunts just been.....its offical your cousins pregent

my brother:well gee big surprise.

Now when i ever go out with mates there is always a chance that i will see my cousin (not a pretty site!) and i might be a bit harsh in saying this but i am not surprise that she is pregnent, the way she dresses up and perades herself to men is appaling!, but its like i said earlier its none of my business.

I have now broken up from school and started on the mile high stack of homework that i have...... I enjoyed the wonderful lie in till 2:00pm and finally decided to drag my ass out of bed. And soon i think i might drag it back to bed.

11:44pm

Got a bunch of work done today. We don't expect to do much tomorrow or next week since all of the suits will be out of the office.

After work, CR came by to play around with a utility for Worms Armageddon that lets you tweak the physics in the game. That game has tons of settings. I've never seen a trainer with so many options.

I've got to find something quick and simple to buy for my parents and brothers for christmas. While I don't want to do anything too fancy, but I think gift certificates for Taco Bell might be a bit tacky.

I'm constantly thinking about Sara. I need to spend some idle time deciding about what I should do. Perhaps I should just let her know that I do think about her often and that I would like to know if she has any special feelings for me. There seems to be no subtle way to establish this kind of information. I've spent quite a bit of time over the past week or two trying to think of a way, but I've been failing. The problem seems to be that the longer I wait to test the waters, the more awkward it will make it to ask, as we continue to establish a friendship.

I need to make it a priority to find out right after she returns. The sooner, the better.

Hmm..

Time for deep thought, sleep, and dreams.

I am unbelievably lazy. Seriously, I cannot believe how lazy I am, in retrospect. I come back to the Noding Room and my chair is gone, I kneel on the hard floor and go right on typing. My book is on the floor a few feet away. I reach for it. No good. I leave it. My bed is covered with stuff. I sleep on the floor. I swallow my gum. I can't find a pen, so I scratch notes into the paper with a pen cap.

But I peel my potatoes before mashing. I shower almost twice a day. Rather than put the stupid modprobe commands in my init files, I retype them every single time I reboot. Every time I go out, I have to do seventeen things first to get ready.

Today found me sleeping until 2 in the afternoon, then attending to my various Christmas projects with something less than enthusiasm. I felt guilty getting goosebumps from listening to my own voice on cassette tape from three years ago (has it been that long?) -- man, I sing good. I'm surrounded by a pile of junk so big it's not worth cleaning up, I have only twelve short hours to finish a ton of stuff before heading back to my hometown for the weekend, and E2 picked today to recapture me. I'm so broke I shouldn't have to buy people Christmas presents, but it doesn't work that way. I thought we were getting robbed this afternoon, but it turned out to be my roommate's ex-roommate busting in and making himself thoroughly at home. This evening found me, my roommate, the ex-roommate, and the ex-roommate's date sitting around the table with a pizza and some sketchy cookies. Social distortion ensued. Jeeves scored 2 humor points, but accrued -30 in penalties for stupid statements. Three guys and a chatty girl is cozy. The other way around makes me nervous. I'm not sure why that is.

I feel like writing a letter to everyone I know, clearing up all the misunderstandings. It seems like it happens to me so often. Someone will say something, I'll miss part of it, I'll nod and smile, and it's the wrong thing to do. The ex-roommate heard that I was a member of a certain choir. I nod and smile. He jests, so you carry the group? I have no idea what he's talking about. I nod and smile. My roommate gives me a look. All at once I see what I've done, I try to jump in and apologize, but it's too late; they're already joking about how egotistical I am. I didn't mean that. I swear.

Worse, I'll say something I don't mean or use the wrong phrase or something with someone important. This severely haunts me, but it's hard to correct. What if the other person didn't hear you, or didn't care, or wasn't listening, or doesn't remember it anymore? Is it worth bringing it up again? Or will they just think I'm an idiot? Once my father caught me in bed with the (ex-)lead singer of our band. We didn't actually do the deed, we just cuddled and fooled around a little bit. In the morning, he lectured me on sexual responsibility. I replied 'yeah, I've been in bed with x girls, and I didn't knock any of them up'. I thought 'to knock up' meant 'to have sex with'. I later found out it means 'to get someone pregnant'. That situation was so embarassing that I don't want to bring it up ever again, but do I care if he thinks I sleep around? Yes and no. I've never done it, not once. And so he probably thinks my wonderful, wonderful sweetheart of two years is a whore.

The older I get, the dumber I was...

I had just closed my eyes when the alarm went off, spurting some insipid top-ten song into my barely awake mind. 6:30 AM, no light had begun to bleed out the night sky. In any city all he light thrown off tints the sky an unpleasant shade of orange-pink; a color that causes me to think of nuclear winter, the end of the world. It was by this light that I padded barefoot to the shower.

Cleaned and Shaved, the experiences just barely eeking past my sensory register and into thought and memory. While in the shower I was able to calculate the amount of sleep I relieved last night: roughly two hours. A warm shower can't shake the feeling of my limbs being cast in lead with powdered glass in the joints.

With a breakfast of Rice Chex and Supercoffee singing in my gut as I ventured outside and scraped my car out of the muck it had frozen itself into overnight. Made the trip to work with Propellerheads pumping from the car stereo—waking me up like no coffee can. I glimpsed a lovely sunrise blooming above the city in my rearview mirror. It's been a while since I've seen one of those.

Work was work, my workload being reduced due to the morning hours. At lunchtime Beautiful Girl brought me some sushi and I fell in love all over again simply because of this. Toasted my sinuses with copious amounts of wasabi and gobbled down my salmon rolls.

The evening was consumed by a trip to Beautiful Girl's parents' house where we dined on stew and sampled various dusty bottles of liqueurs from cordial glasses, getting a little giggly in the process. They got me a Christmas present: a beautiful glass dragonfly (someone let slip my fetish). Their gift—a bottle of authentic North Country apple wine—still rests in my closet in the Frozen North gathering dust.

Two hours of sleep is too little, even for me. Today wasn't too bad, but I can feel the lack of sleep catching up to me, slowly crawling up onto my back and squeezing my temples. Blonde on Blonde is playing softly on the stereo. Tomorrow is the trip home, a straight burn west on the Super Slab on the Saturday before Christmas. I must be careful to pack many excellent mix tapes and underwear to spare.

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