The Human Element

...do you ever wonder at what point you just got to say fuck it man? 

Like when you gotta stop living up here, and start living down here?

Dr. Dragon, or: Why you don't really want to meet the captain's daughter

Should I have a party?  No I should wait.  Should I wait?  I don't know.  I don't think I have enough friends yet.  Maybe I do?  No.  Yes.  No?  I don't know.  Maybe I have more friends than I think.  Maybe I have less friends than I think.  I should collect more friends.  Thats taking too long.  Should I have a party?

That's the kind of indecisive crap that has been rattling around in my head for a long time.  I have already droned on about the social benefits of parties, and why I think meeting cute, inebrieated friends-of-friends is waaaaaay better than being in bars with girls that roll their eyes when you say hi.  Some rather important decisions I've made were predicated on the belief that in time I would have a thriving social life with fun parties.  That's one reason why a huge chunk of my paycheck every month goes towards an overpriced 1-bedroom in a half-ghetto, half-wannabe-upscale part of town with mediocre bars;  it has marble countertops, party space, and a fountain.  The kind of place you'd enjoy visiting for a party or after a night of drinking.

The only element missing in this party equation was people.  I've been dragging my heels for two years on having parties because I didn't quite have enough people.  I decided, though, that I was second-guessing myself and I should just do it.  So I told my friends I was having a pirate party.  I figure, pirates are awesome, and everyone loves dressing up and wow I'm boring myself.  So long story short, nobody came.  I mean, two awesome people came, but it was not enough for a party.  A big-ass pile of liquor, mostly untouched, is still sitting there, mocking me from the spot on the counter where I usually leave clean dishes that I never put away before using them again.  Earlier in the week, it looked like my biggest problem was going to be that there were too many girls, like there was going to be 10 girls an only 2 guys, and I was going on and on about what an ironic problem it was.  Well, double irony, or something.

The three of us sat around for a bit, and then decided to walk to a big movie theatre two blocks away and see Sucker Punch while still dressed in our pirate gear.  Sucker Punch has nothing to do with pirates, and with the exception of a very loud dude who was either drunk or naturally obnoxious, everyone else in the theatre knew that the movie had nothing to do with pirates.  Still, they loved our costumes.  I was standing at the urinal in the bathroom explaining why we were dressed like pirates to someone behind me when I realized we were onto something, I just didn't know what.  What I do know, is when the new x-men related movie comes out, I want to get some friends and wear tuxes/evening gowns to see it.

On a completely unrelated note, I told a new friend at work my story about how I got yelled at for trying not to dance with a guy, and he was more shocked than anyone I've told so far.  His reaction was refreshing, and made me happy.  Ok, and then I just went on another rant about that, which I deleted because it was retarded, but I'll give you this;  it ended with:    ...and we can pretend everything is generic and passionless, and we can pretend that the fact that I am dancing with someone is for some other reason than deep down what I really want to be doing is pushing her chest into mine while we play tongue tennis.  Couldn't let that one go.  Anyway.

Awesome

Sucker Punch was awesome.  Sucker Punch is awesome.  Now, when I say awesome, I don't mean it was a work of art, to be held lofty by people whose cinematic opinions are useless to me, which is pretty much every other human on the planet.  No, when I say it was awesome, I mean that it was just awesome.  Not perfect.  Awesome.  The person who made that movie knew that I wanted to see girls in fully laced thigh-high boots and scant other clothing shoot a dragon from a gatling gun mounted on a WWII-esque multi-engine warplane and then stab it in the head with a katana, and that person knew what it would take for me to watch those things guilt free, without letting any little details about reality bother me.

Normally I am insulted when anyone writes a story where a dragon gets slain by some random person, but this movie was so good I didn't mind.

In grade school they told us that "porn" used to refer to sex OR violence.  Nowadays, but some process I have too little interest in for even a web search, that word is intimately (<-- word choice, people;  notice how its the way I used a particular word, and not the fact that I dumped a bunch of SAT words in a sentence, that matters*) linked with videos of likely STD-ridden people having sex with each other in a suburb of Los Angeles.  I want to take back pornography.  Forget sex;  I don't know if you know this, but you can do that in real life (unless you have -10 points of charisma...we'll get to that soon).  Anyway.  I want the violence.  I want to watch girls fight giant samuari robots.  I want to watch Scott Glen give random wise man briefings.  I want to watch flying fortresses battle dragons.  I think we should make movies that are literally all fight scenes, which save screen time by ommitting things like plot, character development, and sex.  I don't understand why movies get made about villains who can't die to just go around murdering people the whole movie, like Haloween and Final Destination and Saw, which I will call murder-porn, but we can't have movies of hot chicks fighting zombies or something.  I know, you're probably thinking "hot chicks fighting zombies?  what about resident evil?"  No.  I mean the whole movie is just hot chicks--multiple hot chicks--fighting zombies, the whole time.  No exposition, or breaks between fighting, or plot, or movie cliches, or even a single second of soundtrack that goes unpunctuated by gunfire.

Tales from the Trenches

I phone screened a guy who did not understand the difference between  NP-Complete and NP-Hard.  These complexity classes are like the only two classes that I know, so I tend to make a big deal out of them.

My aforementioned piloting-related debt, which admittedly is mostly philly and vegas-related debt by this point, has made it difficult to afford things like a Starcraft2-capable computer or a 600cc sportbike.  However, I found some people to tutor in programming via craigslist.  Craiglist has some seriously creepy and orwelian requirements for posting in the "tutor" section of its classifieds, and I am still too creeped out by the fact that they want more than my phone number (which took a lot of work to fake!), however there is nothing they do to prevent me from responding to ads where people ask for a tutor.  I'm getting two lined up now.  If it turns out that I really like teaching...well, all I have to do is have no life for two years while I go back to school and work my ass off for a masters.

I've gotten to the point with 3-sat where I literally sit around and think about it to amuse myself.  I do this at work, in part as an alternative to playing Unreal Tournament, which would be far more obvious.  I also occasionally think about 3-sat while taking long walks, like the 30 minute walk to salsa.  3-sat has basically become like my own personal drug.

The Human Element

Well, this paragraph was melodramatic.

My next move is...something about simply focusing on other people.  I don't think it really matters which activities or places you choose, if you know how to connect with people, and I don't, yet, not quickly enough.  I can fake social skills in many situations, but I'm a bit of a novice still, and think I'm missing a critical element.  And...well that just turned into another melodramatic paragraph.

Ok, here's the deal.  The playing field is sucky and unfavorable.  I've complained about that enough---waaa there's too many men at salsa, waaa there's no girls in the computer industry--waaa I hate competing with other men like we're all a pathetic pack of wolves.  I'm done complaining.  At least, about that.  I'm going to continue complaining about these morons here who can't cross the street, and the morons who stop their car in the middle of a four-lane road because I need to cross and they are trying to kill me, but I'm done complaining about this pathetic, degrading, social competition.  What I'm going to do instead, is step up and kick their collective asses.  I don't know how I'm going to do it, but every resource is on the table.  I have no pride left--except that which I plan to channel in order to fake an excess of confidence.

The people in the apartment office wrote a bitchy note telling people to stop driving through the courtyard in the wrong direction, and claim that they will stop the radio-controlled gates from being activated from a certain direction, a feat that I consider unlikely and intend to challenge by experiment.  Upon further reflection I wanted to grab a sharpie and ride the elevator in my boxers just so I could write "fuck you" on their stupid little notice.  I didn't do that, because at the moment I'm too shy for that kind of stunt.  There will come a day, though, when I won't be.

*a common mistake made by narcissistic, unpublished writers is to liter their writing with rare, esoteric words with many syllables that raises the reading level above college professor and forces constant use of a dictionary onto the reader.  These idiots seem to write only to inflate their ego with words, and miss the entire point of communication.  Clear and effective writing, to them, means something about "dumbing it down" for the "masses," and their lack of writing ability seems to come with a lack of listening skills as well.  Such overdone bromides have become a bit of a pet peeve of mine, and I am engaged in a continual effort to discover a more effective means of persuading them to pull their heads out of their asses.   <--like see that sentence?  Imagine something 1000 times worse.