2003-05-27 - 2:28 a.m.
A Day, Examined.
The wait for life to begin continues, and as it continues I find myself coming up with more ways that I'm preventing it from beginning by waiting -- if nothing else, having made the choice to purchase antidepressants will have helped me by brining these thoughts to light, even if I end up just tossing them in the trash.
I've been letting work get to me, and since I tend to draw a lot of my character and mental state from the job I'm at, it will serve adequately as a metaphor for how I live the rest of my life. Again, since I do remember saying this before, I'm failing to look at the long run -- that none of the people I work with will, most likely, be there as long as I will. That the best I can really do is attempt to make the store run well, and that if things could be made to run perfectly I would not be necessary.
Someone asked me how I was feeling today while I waited for two employees who hadn't bothered to show up in prior days to come in, most likely expecting their absence to have gone either unnoticed or unmarked. "Bloodthirsty," I said, and added another notch to my reputation as the Manager With Whom You Do Not Fuck, while I tried to keep my breathing even.
Confrontation is not really my forte, and the constant need to override other peoples' opinions is one of the best things for me, personally, about this job -- it's a constant reminder that not only are other people not necessarily right, but that it's okay to disagree with them and state as much and expect one's own opinion to be the one that guides their actions.
I still am what I would term easily excited. Somewhere in the back -- nearer the middle or front as the situations progress -- I expect my parents to come storming out of the wings of the stage I'm on when I play Manager, laugh at me, and tell everyone the joke's over and they can ignore me. I also, to approximately the same degree, somewhere expect the person I'm talking to to wind up and hit me in the face eventually because they're angry and people do stupid things when they're angry.
Punching me would cost them their job, no question, no matter who or how long they've been there, I'm simply too necessary; it would cost me some teeth, too, though, and those are hard to come by.
I wrote up both employees; one of them remains on speaking terms with me because his reason for not showing up was that he got a call from his female cousin who was crying and sobbing incoherently and heard his alcoholic uncle yelling something in the background before the phone cut out.
So he went over to the uncle's house, socked him in his distressed and abused alcoholic's kidneys until he went unconscious and dropped the gun he'd been waving around, and loaded up the cousin's stuff and took her to a new place to live.
He said she had a cut under her eye that went from the bridge of her nose around her cheekbone and nearly up to her eyebrow again.
I don't know what I would like to do in a similar situation. The quasi-intellectual in me still insists that piano wire and a wood-chipper would be an adequate solution, but I'm more than my psychosis, I yam. Rational me says the police are trained and paid to handle situations like that and that the system must work at least most of the time or it wouldn't be present. Reality me says I don't know what the hell I'd do since I don't have a cousin I'd risk going to jail for.
Last time a cousin and I spoke she was attempting to demonstrate her superiority by doing calculus slowly and wrong. Since I'd dropped out, she apparently thought, I must have immediately forgotten the last three years of my life. I crossed out her equations and her pretense when I really didn't need to do either -- there wasn't really any reason to disillusion her to no benefit to either of us; her opinion, positive or negative, doesn't matter.
If something similar happened to someone I really cared about, I suspect that if I were able, I would probably end up being unable to decide on a good course of action and choosing the one that Joe did. As much of a screwup as he is, he's comprehensible and yet still has some genuinely higher motives.
----
Today's drama on the forums I frequent was that someone on the IRC channel that the regulars tend to congregate in for a reason unknown to me uploaded a file called OHSHI.ZIP, which turned out to be a collection of much of the known nudes of the female regulars on the forums.
Initially, I was interested. Curiosity isn't enough of a reason for me to start a conversation with someone, let alone curiosity about how someone's demonstrated intellectual colour jives with their appearance and the mannerisms I attribute to them based solely on their posts and avatars. And it was interesting -- some of the people look exactly as I'd pictured them.
Some of them are eye-bleedingly awful, I must say -- I finally understand a series of forum jokes about a former user named bluedandy. The question came up as to how the pictures were taken, this there was plainly a photographer involved. The answer came back in all caps, since the trauma of the images was fresh: "WITH A TITANIUM-REENFORCED CAMERA AND A BLINDFOLD AND SEDATIVES LOTS OF SEDATIVES".
Then I realized what I was looking at -- not that I really care if they're nudes, since we would have significant difficulty avoiding those on the flamewars forum anyway. Many of them, particularly for one person that I've rather admired from a distance for intellectual character and humor, are only available to the public because of large acts of betrayal on the part of the person the pictures were entrusted to.
I regret the incident at this point, since there's not much of a way I can approach someone and make a convincing case that I really do think highly of them on an intellectual level and oh yeah p.s. nice breasts and you're hot too, let's talk about Sartre.
I remember my response when someone saw my picture and decided they had to talk to me. Magelet Neko on Asheron's Call, though I can't recall her real name; there wasn't much of stark interest about her, and she was shamelessly manipulative of the weaker-willed males around her in the way that some people instinctively or habitually are, female or not.
I will admit, it was flattering -- it is not every day that a lesbian admits to looking at your picture off and on for the last four hours and feeling flushed.
But that's all there was, and I suspect that despite my genuine admiration for this individual, perhaps that's all that would come across in the advent of communication. So I will remain a degree removed, I think, and not add myself to the list of bothers to be dealt with by those who are female in a forum that's almost exclusively techno-geek male.
And yet, the two that I've loved were from online contact that led to real-world interaction.
An oddly-proportioned optimism would venture that perhaps it's because the people I can love are so few and far between that the chance of them being in physical proximity to me is very small. Like I said, it's an odd sort of optimism.
I've never really decided what the pessimist in me is actually trying to get out -- which leads me to suspect that it's the less rational side, since I've been trying to get any coherent answer from it for years with no real success. "Something bad", is about the clearest it gets, and the certainty that the online thing is indicative of something wrong with me.
No doubt because it's not normal.
..and yet.
I remember on my way to meet Simone for the first time I was terribly self-conscious about the stereotypical meeting-Internet-people thing, and happened to be laid over in a bus station somewhere in northern California waiting for the next leg of the Greyhound trip. I was sitting next to an insomniac homosexual who decided to liven the otherwise dull night by proferring his notebook of scribblings to me and asking me what I thought -- I raised an eyebrow at the border, which was composed of his having written "note to self: it is a bad idea to masturbate on the bus, no matter how late it is or how sure you are that no one is looking".
He was, he said, on his way to meet a beautiful man that he'd met online that he was going to live with.
On my way back, I sat next to a very pretty hippy-type who talked with me about living on $5000 a year in a lodge on the side of a mountain and how difficult it could be to put up with the peccadillos of one's loved ones. I bought her a bottle of water at a gas station somewhere around Oregon, I believe, and entrusted with her the secret that I was returning from meeting a formerly faceless Internet person that I'd fallen for, hard.
She nodded and waited for the punchline, since that was apparently nothing extraordinary in her experience.
So perhaps it's not so abnormal, just not something we talk about proudly.
Now that I've not seen James in months after giving him a thousand dollars to get his apartment-related credit back in line that I really could have used for something else, I think I can say it safely: my best friends are the ones I've made online.
I think it's partially because of something I rant about periodically -- my complete inability to help people out at this sort of distance. We're forced to choose the people (and I recognize that there are a lot of exceptions to this, and that the help people are looking for isn't always real-world) we talk to based more on who they appear to be as an intellectual and social entity than a potential help.
Granted, we still go by sources of entertainment and there's no claiming that bodies don't matter on the Internet -- otherwise porn done right wouldn't be so profitable.
..but, at least for me, it's the intellect that animates the body and gives it a motion more complex than a tree's windborne sway.
Today was not a bad day. I have something I regret and some things to think about, as well as plans for tomorrow that begin at 10AM if I can force myself awake that early.
I am seriously considering watching Bruce Almighty, The Matrix: Reloaded, and X-Men 2 in one movie-bloated day, more or less. I've heard negative reviews and positive reviews of all of the above, and am more than willing to go to any of them expecting nothing but entertainment.
..but honestly, how many trips to a movie theatre bathroom or snack bar can one noticing mind withstand? Perhaps someone will appear and be a movie-buddy for the day.
On the vague off-chance that anyone here is in the area and has the desire to go do something tomorrow and is off of work/school/whatever in the appropriate time and etc, I'm buying.
Until another tomorrow,
Midelne
Addendum
In the first ever Diaryland photo of any part of me, here is my hand holding my nemesis of the last two days, severed from its demoniacal body and its' evil powers quelled for the moment. I imagine this would have taken less than two days had I known what a starter looked like to begin with, seh?
DLand