Happy Christmas and New Year to all…

Thanks for your comments.

vertigo_josh: Christmas evolved into the stress-fest it is slowly over time. Frankly, pressure is all in your head and can be dealt with if you take proper precautions. Proper use of your time off is a big one.

lazarusrat: How much of a can of worms?

Londo: You’re absolutely right, folks that think Christianity is a free pass through life need to read the whole Bible and notice the part where Jesus says he’s going to condemn a lot of people that thought he was going to save them. I’m sorry if a lot of the Christmas presents you get ring hollow.

Most of my Christmasses I only get a few things from the people I live immediately around. Sometimes my mom or dad send me money, but, well, I don’t think my mom could afford it and my dad bought me a ticket to visit him, so that’s good enough. I usually get stuff I immediately need, like this year, I got extra pants for work.

I’ve learned to appreciate things I need more than things I want, and frankly, if I get enough things I need it frees my money to buy things I want just a little bit more… I’ll go into that in a minute.

For the benefit of Iwanttoleavemybody I will quickly repeat about the time I was riding in the back of the car, listening to these not really friends of friends of friends talking about all this stuff they learned about their past lives and their spirit auras or whatever…. I usually find that sort of conversation fascinating and try to learn whatever I can, but I heard exchanges like, “But your soul is kitsune and kitsune are powerful and kind.” Actually, kitsune is a deadly, vengeful monster from Japanese lore. This is why I knew they were full of shit.

This fellow in the front continued on about how he remembered his past life as a fox, and his whole fox family was shot dead mercilessly by a hunter, and before the hunter blew him away, the hunter said, “Stupid foxes,” and did the deed. Um… hunters aren’t unsportmanlike. Most countries have laws against killing animals known to be pregnant and it’s unsportmanlike to shoot a baby. This is aside from the fact that a fox can’t understand a word of English.

If you’d like to read more details, it’s way on the last page of my past posts, it was a very early one.

compassion: ‘Chastize’ is a strong word, don’t you think? It’s okay if you don’t like my writing.

WHY AM I THE ONE THAT IS UNIMAGINATIVE WHEN I THINK SOMEBODY ELSE’S ARTWORK ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH?

Criticism is given in the hopes of explaining either why you don’t like something or how something can improve. That’s really all I have to say on the subject. On to other things…

GOOD ENOUGH CHRISTMAS

I’m trying not to start a rant based on one of my presents… the closest thing I got to a frivolous gift was a DVD-ROM drive for this workstation, because when I built it I wanted it to become a home video powerhouse of sorts. I’ve got all the software I need now and it just played a Coldplay concert beautifully.

Several copmuters were confiscated and many people were jailed to make this software possible. I will continue the rant later.

Otherwise, my local family gave me some clothes and blankets that I’ve really needed lately. Most of my pants for work are beginning to fray along the bottom of the legs, so I really appreciate the new ones.

I live very far from my actual blood family, so I don’t see them for Christmas. Even when I did, my family lacks the tensions and issues that most people complain about in the holidays… not that we don’t have any problems at all, but I do feel blessed that my family solves their problems well, I can’t remember a single holiday in my life where there were family issues. I’m very lucky that way.

I hope everybody had good holidays.

‘BROKE AND COPING’ AND SOCIAL OBEDIENCE
or
WHAT THIS BLOG IS

If anyone ever gets the impression that this is the place where I come to whine about my problems, please let me know. I would like to clarify the purpose of this site.

It has been slightly more than ten years since I started college. I do not regret my time in college. I learned a lot of things about life there, in fact, I got everything I wanted to out of college at the time when I left, though I really wanted to stay and finish- I was simply unable to borrow the money I needed to take that last class I needed to graduate. It was that simple. I exhausted all my options for scholarships and grants, and I couldn’t borrow anymore so that was that.

College is not the sole reason I am ‘broke’. I spent my time after college doing a mish-mash of what people said I ‘ought’ to do as well as doing what I thought I should be doing to get my music to take off. The end result is the person I am today.

The purpose of this site is to present the awareness that you can do everything correctly and still fail, or be labelled as a failure.

The ‘coping’ part is about how I deal with this ‘failure’ label, because despite its presence on my back, I remain alive and must continue to live. Because social conventions and pressures do not allow me to become successful, I must succeed by my own terms and in my own mind, whether other folks want to acknowledge my success or not. I do this by giving myself goals that I have learned to recognize as attainable under the circumstances in which I live.

For example, name anybody under 30 that’s held any job down for more than five years straight. There’s a certificate over my TV, signed by the CEO and Vice President of Human Resources that says I’ve succeeded where all my office-working temp-to-perm (but really only temp) friends have not.

Goals like this are why it doesn’t matter to me anymore if I ever take the proverbial monkey off my back. In a certain way, I’m proud of it, because I’m not struggling under someone else’s orders. If I fail to acheive my goals, it’s my own fault, and I like it better that way.

RESPONSIBILITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY

My weekend was a bit long, my pal is blessed with a 12/27 birthday and he turned 30, so it was important to me to be at his party for him. Sunday his parents took him for Dim Sum in Chinatown, and I’m very lucky that he was allowed to bring me along as well as his wife. They paid the whole bill themselves.

On the way down, his father was asking his Uncle (with the car dealership) about different issues regarding the dying transmission in the minivan, and the uncle is telling stories about how repair shops are usually afraid to do rebuilds because they’re more difficult to guarantee. At least with a new transmission, if it fails you can replace it under some kind of waranty.

In this situation, Uncle Bill is trying to remedy the situation by avoiding a necessary headache and getting their van running again with a nice quality rebuild. Why throw out something that you know works fine otherwise?

A few weeks earlier I heard a software engineer complaining about how he had to make a simple database work under Oracle. His description of the project was way easier than the scope he was implying, it was a simple search engine I could write on this computer in my sleep by making a large text file and using ‘grep’ but he had to get his stuff to behave under SQL and Oracle and all that junk, because 1) This is a government project and 2) Someone besides the programming team (in this case, Oracle) must be able to be held accountable in the event of failure. After all, these engineers could have programmed it my way even faster than I just now wrote about it…

In the name of culpabiility, we must shelve common sense.

STOP. TRY SOMETHING NEW.

Now, if you’re not familiar with the Dim Sum concept, you are seated at your table in a restaurant and the waitstaff push carts with dishes on it around the aisles. If you see something you like, you ask for it, and it is placed in the center of your table for the folks at your table to pluck some out for themselves with chopsticks.

There I was, in the back corner… my pal to my right and his wife to his… we’ve got our chopsticks at the ready and every time something rolled by and was described, I see a face across from me at the table gag, and up goes my finger. Of course I want to try some, most of the time I didn’t care what it was made out of until after I took a bite. Mind you, I’m accustomed to trying strange food. When I was in college, I had friends from Japan that I’d visit and they’d put plates of god-knows-what in front of me and I’d have to eat it out of politeness. Mind you, I liked most of what they served me, but I tried so many things that to this day I don’t know the name of it… but it gave me a taste for the strange.

So I’m holding this thing in my chopsticks that looks like a potato pankake with a bite out of it, because the bite is what I’m chewing on, while the folks across the table from me who are schoolteachers and own car dealerships are struggling with a knife and fork on the only thing on the table they can identify- shrimp.. with something around it. (That something was kelp. They were awesome…) It just seems to me that if you’re going to go eat someplace like that, you should either be Chinese or be willing to eat something that’s not in your normal cuisine.

…

If I’m sounding too angry for the season, let me know before I post my rant on the state of DVD.

See you next time.