Self Righteous Suicide

"If we’re going to date, you may have to defeat the rest of my seven evil exes."

"So what you’re saying is we’re dating?"

An asshole is someone who was born with a penis but tells OkCupid they are a girl.  Naturally, since OkCuipd's matching algorithm still has it out for me, I got matched up with him.  Even the websites here match me with guys when I look for girls.  I read half of this guy's profile in disbelief.  He had some thing going on where he  thinks hes a "neutral" gender, kind of like how some people think they are Elvis.  I thought about writing him a nasty note, or trying to be mean via some other measure, and then I realized that nothing can give back those 45 seconds of my life--they are gone forever.  All I can do is complain about it, and appear  bigoted or whatever.  I think the only reason I care is that I'm not used to guys appearing on my radar.  Normally my brain filters them out, but when I guy is pretending to be a girl, it fucks up my whole system.  Its like when sonic is running along collecting rings, but every once in a  while runs into one of those power up monitors that hurts you because its a Dr. Robotnik power up.  I don't even know how we're supposed to treat these dudes.  Is this the same thing as when your buddy shows up at the library with an apple sticker on his old ass IBM laptop, and no one says anything because you feel sorry for him?

Work is a roller coaster.   I get interested.  I get borred.  Frustrated.  Interested.  And it continues.  I did realize one thing though.  I can't tell you what we use at Amazon, but I can tell you that I've realized one big reason not to leave is that other places will force me to code on windows.  I really...windows is so awkward I think I might rather do boring work in a good operating system than exciting work on windows.  I could be wrong.  Idk.  I am occasionally finding projects that are interesting enough for me to stay late working on them, which is good because that negates all the time  I sit around binging on wikipedia (todays started at Mary Poppin's and ended up at Bonded Warehouse).  Despite this, I often walk home mentally exhausted.

Foul Weather Friends are an interesting concept, and I have one.  You see I have two girls in play right now--well, its one girl in play.  This one...we were, I thought, seeing each other.  You know, that stage where you're hanging out, checking each other out, but not dating exclusively.  Some people don't know it exists; others are creeped out if you thought you were doing anything else.  So that was fine, except every time she got in my car she'd ask how my dating life is going.  This is the girl who likes to be stalked.  She also doesn't carry her cell phone.  Prefers to leave it at home, and off.  Also, she's a foul weather friend, which I'm declaring as the opposite of a fair weather friend, and more literal:  she disappears when the weather is nice.  For example, she told me she would love to come over to my place and play Legos.  Yeah, I told her about the Legos--that can be a good card to play if you want to have that geek angle--anyway, this is the second time a girl had wanted to "play Legos" with me, and I think they just say that to get in my pants, because so far I don't think any of them even knows what that means.  That, or they are accustomed to playing with Legos when you only have 10 of them.  I have 20,000.  So anyway, I said she was welcome to come over some tuesday night, wondering to myself what the hell we were going to build.  The night before I carry every single fucking crate of legos out of my hiding place in the closet to my living room, and arranged them for easier access to brick-style pieces, because obviously no one ever starts with the box full of Lego tires.  I emailed her during the day asking if 7pm was good for her.  She emailed me back saying it was too nice outside, and "Legoland would have to wait."  It was her fucking idea!  Also, it was dark less than two hours after 7pm.  Also, I noted that she just blew it off instead of suggesting that we hang out outside.  This girl really likes being outside.  I mean reeeallly likes being outside.  I assume she had a date with someone else, or something, or maybe I was supposed to be all "masculine" and aggressive and try to hang out with her outside.  Then again, maybe acquiescing to her whims like that is less masculine.  I don't know.  This is the same girl who wants to make out outside.  Like, in the wilderness.  I've looked into it.  We happen to live in a city.  This city is surrounded by suburbs and water, and I don't have a boating license (yet).  There are a number of small national parks, like Mt Rainier, where you're not allowed to walk on the grass (not kidding!) and various other parks all in close proximity to houses.  Making out outside does seem awesome to me, at least in my fantasy world where encounters with bears, hikers and park rangers are not likely.  Unlike this one.  I've never been arrested, and the police don't have my fingerprints.  I'd like to keep it that way, in case I ever decide to shoot a traffic camera with a rifle (this would, of course, occur on a closed course with legaly obtained blah blah blah.  Research for my novel.).  In any case, I bought a military style compass (in order to get us a couple miles due south of the nearest trail) and then decided I don't really feel like dealing with this girl.  So.  If you need a military style compass, hit me up.

There was a Lego contest at work.  I didn't participate.  You had to show up at 8 am and use only bricks (1x1 to 1x8 to 2x4, etc).  There was nothing I wanted to build out of those types of pieces.  Some guy wanted make a jersey out of legos.  I gave him some pointers and a link to Lego graph paper.  That reminds me.  Lego released a new pirate ship.  I want it.  Also my lego mosaic is nearly complete.  It is literally missing once piece, because when I ordered all of the pieces that I miscounted, I miscounted again and left one out.

Firefly Girl is gone.  I have no one to watch Castle with, and I am very much going to miss watching Castle with her.  Even though I accidentally texted her another girl's name, and even though she later rejected me, I still really enjoyed watching Nathan Fillion be goofy and solve murders.  I have no idea how to replace her, unless there is a hidden cache of attractive Firefly fans somewhere.

Seaweed is not something you normally search all over the city for.  Here's the deal.  Hot Lego Girl came over my apartment and cleaned it while I played Castle Crashers with her russian friend.  I was initially shocked that a girl would love cleaning so much that she'd come over and clean a stranger's apartment.  Then I started noticing her clean things that I was under the impression didn't need cleaning.  So, that was interesting.  My apartment has been somewhat cleaner since.  I try to keep it nice, but the only real victory has been that I've been putting my toothpaste and floss back in their little holder thing instead of letting them sit on the counter.  I mean, I was doing that.  Anyway.  So we were going somewhere, maybe that day, probably the next--and then we start going all over town trying to find steamed vegetables, or something, because Hot Lego Girl was on this crazy diet where you only eat vegetables on day 1.  Eventually we settled on walking all the way to Chinatown so she could buy seaweed at the asian supermarket.  While there, she asked me if brussel sprouts were a vegetable, and was not happy about my reaction to that question.

Seaguls can be made to dive by giving small pieces of bread the proper arc.  I  found this out while hanging out with Hot Lego Girl again, and again it was me her and the russian kid.  She invited us out to feed birds down on the pier using some moldy (only a tiny bit) bread that she obtained from her workplace.  Call me racist, but I dislike pigeons, and deliberately spend all my tie at the railing throwing my bread out over the water, where apparently those nasty bird rats are unable to fly, so that no pigeon got food from my hand.  After a while, I noticed that sometimes a seagull would dive (like a falcon) for a piece of bread that I threw, and dedicated the rest of my bread throwing to the study of what is required to induce a seagull to dive.  Ladies and gentleman, I have discovered it:  the means, or at least a means, of causing a seagull to dive after food and not just watch it go by and come around for another pass.  The trick is you need the bread to arc through their field of vision with a trajectory roughly 90 degrees to their path of travel, so that the bread flies right across their face.  If you get bored of that, you can always try to throw the bread above them and watch them scramble up to get it.

Exponential backoff is a term you may be unfamiliar with, so first let me introduce it to you.  When computers talk to each other, some protocols of communication dictate that when they start to lose messages (due to network congestion) they send fewer messages.  But they don't just send a couple less, they back off exponentially.  For more informatino see RFC 1122.  Ironically, that link is meant for the kind of reader who won't bother clicking on it.  Anyway.  So I really can't tell if Hot Lego Girl is interested in me.  I mean, I really can't.  I have so many times missed obvious interest from girls, while wasting so many years of my life by falsely inferring interest from others, that I just can't fucking tell anymore unless they come out and say it.  For example:  I took Hot Lego Girl out, and we played some pool, and she later told me about how she got all...whatever at some girl that I didn't realize was checking me out.  Then, hours later, I tried to put my arm around her while we watched this nice romantic comedy called Sin City, and she didn't seem to like that.  Then again, she did get drunk and try to convince me to not leave Seattle.  Then again, she also blew me off the next two times I tried to hang out with her.  So, I started using exponential backoff:  the first time she blew me off, I waited one day until I asked her out again.  The second time she blew me off I waited two days.  Had she blown me off a third time I would have had to wait 4 days.  Then she texted me saying I should come out next week to celebrate her birthday.  I think that counts for resetting the backoff.  Dorky?  Yes.  But it seems to be working.  I think there is a strong desire that a lot of people have where we just want to know that we have someone--even if its a really small degree of "have"--even if its just some acknowledgment that you're dating.  Its like you have the ace and king of hearts in your hand, and the jack and queen are on the table, and you just want to see the 10 so you can relax.  But I don't have that reassurance, and maybe I'll never get it.  All I can say is I admit its more exciting this way*.

Traffic Stops don't scare me any more.  More precisely, I didn't feel anything.  We were on our way back to Hot Lego Girl's place, after she had gotten drunk and demanded that I take her to Jack in the Box (a fast food chain I don't remember from the east coast) but settled for three large fries at McDonald's (this act likely canceled out her seaweed diet, but from where I was standing, she didn't need a diet in the first place).  I realized I was in the exit lane, so I moved over one and punched it.  Seconds later there were flashy lights in my mirror.  This is the second time I've gotten pulled over for allegedly speeding after a lane change.  This time, though, was different.  Every time I've ever been pulled over in my life, my heart has raced, my hands have shaked, and there's been adrenaline in my blood.  This time, I felt nothing.  This was almost unfortunate, because Hot Lego Girl started to get all worried, and it is difficult to project an aura of calmness when you literally feel nothing.  In retrospect, I should have touched her on the arm, because my former and all time favorite salsa teacher once showed us raw reassuring potential of a mere touch, which is extremely important when you're leading a girl through...anyway.  So.  It wasn't because I was drunk; 2.1 drinks in 4 hours does not a buzzed make me.  So what was it?  Nothing I've ever consciously done has ever made me fearless of cops.  This time, though...just, nothing.  Guy came up on the passenger side, because of the way I had to pull over near a median.  Afterwards, it was extremely interesting the way he tried to bait me:  he didn't ask me a question, just said something, something about me getting a bug up my ass and allegedly accelerating to 80 mph.  I'm starting to wonder if they are trained to so that in a certain way, because I was speechless--there was literally nothing I could say.  You can't say "I'm not answering that question" when they don't ask a question.  All I could do, really, was shake my head and confirm that I wasn't discussing it.  Minutes later we left without a ticket.  I couldn't tell you why, and I couldn't tell you why I felt nothing.  It was like someone flipped a switch off.  Maybe it was just because a hot girl was riding shotgun;  that kind of thing tends to change your priorities.

Fashion consultants. Thats what I'm calling these girls in my minds--the ones I'm going to pay to take me shopping and tell me not to wear jeans every day.  They have their own name for their business, but it is to retarded for me to write or speak.  I met up with the one in a coffee shop, and she gave me a price.  Its gonna run me 1/14th the cost of a 600cc sportbike.  She seemed super excited in person, but less than motivated over email.  I told her when I'm free and I've been waiting for a reply all week.

Retarded.  I was watching the video for "Rolling in the Deep" by Adele which inspired my idea about a crazy person who fills his house with bottles of whiskey (technically bourbon, or whatever) and kills someone, maybe a vampire, but lighting them on fire.  It turned into the climactic ending of one of the five roadninja volumes.  Anyway, instead of crazy I went for fake retarded, and I was trying to spruce up the antagonists dialog when I realized I don't really know my racial slurs--like at all.  Like it you grabbed 20 random ethnicities from around the world, I would only be able to piss off three of them, and really, in my opinion, calling a white person a cracker isn't that offensive anyway.  So I started googling for the racial slur for retarded.  Seriously, I was hoping for a chart (Like on the left it would say "White people" or "the blind" and then on the right it would say "cracker" and whatever mean thing  there is for blind people).  Unfortunately, I couldn't find a single slur for actual retarded people.  I was sure there had to be one but the only thing I could find were some people who think the word retarded itself is a slur.  You know what kind of person thinks retarded is a slur?  Sarah Palin.  That idea is so fucking stupid--wait--rewind a sec.  That's retarded.  Long story short, I left empty handed, and there is no way I'm having the antagonist (an unsympathetic character) use  the word retarded;  the reader could infer that I'm discouraging its use.  Instead, I'm going to try to have the antagonist (who at his parents request, tries to murder his sister in an "honor killing") bitch at someone for using the word retarded in casual conversation.  Yeah, this is what authors do.


Sonic is Dead.  Not the blue hedgehog that was my childhood hero (before Sega's demise and the corruption of sonic games by the introduction of that punk as bitch Shadow) but my desktop computer, sonic.  I had a laptop named knuckles.  It dies also.  I had a laptop named Tails too--it hasn't quite died, but its out  of commission.  I think I'm going to stop naming computers after sonic characters.  More importantly, I need a new computer, and fast.  It's been having problems for a while, such as freezing every time I played Unreal Tournament for too long.  I suspect a cooling failure and a fried processor.  Having just discovered that there was an expansion pack to Doom3, one of very few AAA game titles that was made for linux, and with Duke Forever being delayed, I could have gone a bit longer with my current setup.  I've been dragging my feet about buying a new computer, mostly due to committing funds elsewhere, but there's nothing like a busted computer to force your hand.  Starcraft II, here I come.

System of a Down played in Seattle tonight.  My friend invited me go to.  While I love metal, I typically don't go for whatever kind of metal System of a Down is.  Especially not Rage Against the Machine, because the lead singer, to me, has always sounded like a little kid for some reason.  System of a Down though, that I could do.  I had been wanting to start going to concerts anyway.  The only song of theirs that I really know was "Chop Suey" and of that mostly just the line about a self-righteous suicide, which always bothered me because self-righteous+suicide  always seemed like an inescapable oxymoron.  They played a good show though, and their guitarist is amazing.  Also, their frontman seems to have operatic power in falsetto.  I don't know whats going on with he vocal chords when guys take something so high they sing it falsetto, but I was fairly sure it was not possible to project your voice like that.


*I was in the theatre once, watching The Da Vinci Code with the girl of my dreams.  I remember realizing that I would probably never get any more than that (I was right!) and that I should just relax and enjoy the movie, enjoy what little time I had with her.  So that's what I did.  Later I decided that is the only way to play it.