Now You Did It

Today was supposed to be "Suit Up Day."  I am mildly interested in the idea of dressing up, especially when most of the people around you won't, so I got up this morning and got my suit out of my closet in order to discover that the pants don't fit me anymore--not by a long shot.  More precisely, I no longer fit my pants.  I threw on a button up shirt over jeans and consoled myself that at least I could ride the Falco into work.

Came home to do my daily lifts, which are at night now because since my last girlfriend I haven't been able to motivate myself to get up by 7 or 8 am anymore.  Anyway.  I've probably written to death about how a brief interest in running and weight loss led to nearly irreperable harm to the joins, tendons and ligaments in my legs.  Due to overdoing it, and wanting to concentrate on fewer things (in the hopes of actually accomplishing some of them), I cut out the cardio in favor of weight lifting, since having too thin a frame seems like a bigger problem than being fat.  I was taking it easy with the weights...until tonight.

I appear to have injured my sternum somehow.  Not sure how I did it, but I happened while I was bent over doing tricep extensions, although to be fair I had just been doing pushups with these little handlebars before that.  Sooo now my chest hurts from lifting too much.  It only hurts when I breath in though, so I have that going for me.




P.S.
I love 4 dimensions.

[fiction] How it Works

I got the idea while riding home from work one day to try to write a short story with gender roles slightly reversed.  Specifically, I was going to imagine a world just like this one except where girls dominate in programming and actively discriminate against men.  I thought, "hey yeah this will make me so enlightened and shit."  So I started going through the basic elements.  I thought I would expand on Coder's Island and make it the male protagonists sort of goal to be found worthy to join the girls there, even though [people think] most boys can't program for shit.

I was partly interested in this because when I hear about discrimination, whether gender or race based, I always try to put myself in the shoes of the victimized, but with an emotionless, chess-playing mindset.  What actions can I take to further my gender/people?

So, I started going through the discrimination my character would face.  Obviously, it would be an uphill battle with people telling him he can't do it.  Side note:  when I read accounts of "discrimination" by women...a lot of the time it seems like the only discrimination they face is people saying shit to them.  WTF?  Its just words.  Anyway.  So people will be saying shit, which is probably the easiest thing to deal with...you ignore it.  Then, there would be people making shit difficult for him...stuff like he'll have to study twice has hard because he will have to get a perfect score just to be admitted into whatever program, etc.

And then I thought about girls today in all-male environments, and how they are constantly hounded on a sexual level, and taking some inspiration from Mad Men, I tried to imagine this guy landing a programming job, with all girls, and the girls never leave him alone, and constantly make inappropriate jokes, and constantly...want to sleep with him...................I shouldn't have to tell you that at this point, the entire idea fell apart.  I would fucking love to live in a world like that.

First of all, since I'm the one being discriminated against, I don't have to listen to anyone bitching about being discriminated against.  Secondly, after being forced to be basically the best coder on the planet just to get a job, I will constantly be hounded by unsolicited offers for sex, or at least dates.  It won't matter how fucking ugly I am, because I'll be like the only guy in the fucking building.  This is basically the perfect fucking life.

I have heard this phrase "the odds are good but the goods are odd" referring to men in the computing fields, which is why I put significant effort into being able to break out of the computer nerd stereotype at will (I also hate 50% of nerds).  So, maybe to make this a true comparison, we need to make all of the girl programmers fat and/or WOW players.  Or worse, D&D players.  Or even worse...well I can't really think of anything more annoying than D&D.

I'm not going to do that though--not only do I believe that most male programmers are attractive enough, but I can't be bothered to waste time writing about a world full of fat girls.  In fact, typically, when I write fiction, all of the women are fit and bisexual.  The reason they are bisexual, obviously, is because I am just an enlightened and tolerant person....

So um...I'm stuck with this story.  I can't...I really want to explore what it would feel like to be discriminated against, because I feel like most of the time I am just watching from the sidelines, wanting to do whatever I can to encourage more female participation in certain areas of life, but whenever I talk to people about actually doing something about it, it seems like those people are more interested in just sitting around bitching about what my gender has done wrong.

So...maybe I will write this story, but its not going to be a serious essay.  In fact, it is going to involve:

• motorcycles
• sex on motorcycles
• tunnels
• cult people wearing cool looking robes
• gargoyle statues
• a sword fight
• an elite cadre of female programmers
• an unnecessary amount of sex scenes
• people dying
• an NSA agent gets burned alive or raped or shot by local police during a knockless warrant raid or something
• an offensive patent lawyer gets burned alive or raped or shot by local police during a knockless warrant raid or something 
• an executive of monsanto gets burned alive or raped or shot by local police during a knockless warrant raid or something 
• running from cops
• explosions
• races on motorcycles in tunnels
• secret society

Hmmm.....and, so, I've basically just turned it into another Road Ninja story. Except none of my male characters fit the role...Biff is either a narcissistic playboy or a melodrammatic, haunted shell of a person.  Snow Monkey is an aloof, borderline crazy person with a single dark event in his past who takes nothing seriously, ever.  Jason Web is a boring guy who follows Biff for a while but then settles down and gets married with kids.  Lawrence is Asian, and quit some random thing to own a tire shop--wait.  Hmmmmmmmm.  No he still doesn't fit.

In the same way that the rare girl is lured into the male-dominated world of motorcycles, I need a guy to be lured into this sort of awesome female-dominated world of programming.  Most guys don't love it;  he does.  His love for it draws him into this world like a magnet.  Maybe he is shy and sheltered, and trying to maintain appearances for an overbearing family member.  No, maybe not.  Maybe he is alone, like the narrator in The Great Gatsby.  Hey what if it was kind of like that, except Gatsby was a girl?

I think I at least have a name for him:  Ethan.  In computer land people call him "echo."

Damn

These fuckers have their shit together.  That is, possibly, the perfect interface for what they do.  I played with it and their prices are ridiculously competitive.  Probably low-balling, but still a great strategy.  I want everything I do to have interfaces this good.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

"But I am not capable of love..."

"Then its going to be a very unique experience."

-Data and Guinan

At work, the Android project that was basically canceled for good is now an enormously high priority project that needs to be done yesterday with millions of dollars on the line.  This is the same project that we could have done, and re-done, three times by now if they hadn't constantly stopped and started it.  The dumbasses making these decisions are above me by like 3 levels in the food chain.  I have no words.

At [relationship noun], I just had another relationship end.  Again, didn't write about it here until now, thanks to Chris.  It was growing obvious that the relationship wouldn't work.  I was second-guessing myself about ending it, though, because I seem to go through a lot of girls, however dragging my feet only prolonged things until she was the one to end it.  We'll call her girlfriend N-1.  You know whats weird?  I'm pining more for girlfriend N-2.  I thought I had disabled all of the machinery in my mind that facilitates these useless attachments to girls, but I must have missed some.  I'm pretty sure, at this point, that we've been broken up for almost as long as the relationship lasted, and I still miss her.  It was strange.  N-1 was a computer science major, and we shared a lot of common interests, but didn't have much of a connection.  N-2 had very few common interests with me, but I felt a very strong connection with her; when she wasn't trying to make me drink beer or try foods I'm allergic to or dragging me to a gay club, everything felt right.  Maybe I'll hit the salsa scene or something;  I don't know.  I'm pretty busy with this damn startup, and I don't feel motivated to make another list of 100 things I have to do right now that will change my life.  The only thing I'm doing is lifting again.  Inspired by a random post on reddit chronicling something Jerry Seinfeld allegedly said, I stuck a calendar page on my wall and mark off every day I lift.  My goal is to fill the calendar with red ink.  I'm not going to worry about the perfect form, or if I'm eating enough, or pushing myself hard enough, or if its the right time of day...I'm just going to make sure I lift, consistently, every day.  Fun fact:  at one point, I was trying lift every day, meditate every day, drink fruit smoothies every day, walk up 10 flights of stairs 3 times a day, do aerobic workouts every day, work on learning Spanish every day, and also practice salsa every day.  And I had to save every receipt for everything I bought, everywhere, and enter that into a spreadsheet.  So we are scaling back our goals a little.

At other work, with this startup, my business partner seems to have forgotten what guaranteed payments are and why we were going to have them.  This is unfortunate because the lawyers are waiting for a response to an email asking what amounts we want to set, and when I discussed the amounts with her, she suddenly wanted to re-do them.  You could technically say it is my fault for not taking better notes during our meeting with the accountant.  So now we are basically repeating an entire conversation again.  I'm doing it differently this time though.  I'm just patiently explaining shit over and over again, and letting her figure stuff out instead of just handing her the answer.  I waiver every other week between wanting to kill the partnership, and being certain that this is going to work out great and we will make a lot of money.  Regardless of the outcome, I am thrilled to be attempting something because it has been a phenomenal learning experience.

In other news, it has come to my attention that DC asked some artists to draw Harley Quinn naked in a bathtub, or something, and now I guess a lot of people on the internet have opinions on that, and its supposed to be an attack on women.  Let me leave you with this thought:  what if they had asked for a picture of Joker naked in the exact same way in a bathtub.  Would thousands of men be crying out at the injustice?  I think not.  Is my argument invalid because things are different for women, or some nonsense argument that involves the words 'patriarchy' or 'society' or 'misogyny'?  If so, I call bullshit.  If you want equality, the idea of Harley Quinn naked in the bathrub AND the Joker naked in a bathtub must both be evil/horrible/degrading.  Otherwise, neither of them are.

I, for the record, am not offended by either character naked in the bathtub.  But I probably don't have to tell you which one I wouldn't waste money on the comic for.

Finger Binging

You may hear the phrase "finger Bing" at some point.  I would you like you all to know I came up with that.

Requiem for a Partnership: Part 6

meh

Options

I wanted to move home by my birthday;  that was going to be my birthday present to myself.  Might not happen.  But I could do it if I really wanted to.  The only question is how much risk I can take.  I see a range, that is best characterized by these three options.

1.  Highest risk:  quit my day job now, and do whatever it takes to make money on my own, and move back East.


2.  Medium risk:  take a job back East to move there before any of my side projects take off.


3.  Low risk:  continue working at M$ until my side projects make a certain amount of money.

Options 2 or 3 could be made less painful by having my birthday in Vegas.

I've been doing #3 for a few years.  Fortunately, the skin care thing is at least gaining traction.  I have a timeline to making money, or at least I could easily make one if I wanted to, but I don't want to, because even the most aggressive timelines don't have us making much money before my birthday.  I don't want to spend another fucking birthday in this shithole city.

Speaking of, now that I am seriously considering leaving in a shorter timescale, I am beginning to appreciate many aspects of Seattle.  Maybe, once I move back East, I will regret it.  Maybe all of my friends will be married and boring with kids and I'll never recover my social network and I'll hate the weather and something about allergies.  Or, maybe, I will have the time of my fucking life being back in or near Philly.  All I really know is this:  I want to find out the hard way.