Bob tackles the subject of soul mates:

The idea of a soul mate is a Noble Lie. If you are single, you are not seeking the one, single, solitary person who is right for you. You are seeking for someone who is right for you. Once you find this person, declaring them to be your soul mate merely gives you the confidence to actually go through with the deal and marry the person. It also dissuades you from looking around for something better. It is a lie, but it has a noble purpose. That’s what makes it a noble lie.

One of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever had was with Evangeline. She believes in their being “the one” and I don’t. I believe in God and she doesn’t. The bending of the arguments around one another and how the beliefs in soulmates and God are expressed in such similar manners (as are the counter-arguments) was a real learning experience. Someday I’ll have to try to reproduce the conversation for a Ghostland piece.

I think that the mistake of the notion of “soul mates” is that believing that there is a single one. The idea of their being hundreds or thousands of potential soul mates out there almost negates the meaning, but not quite. I believe that a soulmating is something that occurs over time. I believe that there are many potential soulmates, but that only one can be cultivated and be formed at any given time.

It’s sort of like pregnancy in that regard, I guess. Lots of sperm, but (usually) only one can become a baby at a time. Sometimes none do.

How does a soulmating cultivate? After people spend enough time with one another, they start growing together. Those aspects that are completely incompatible with their partner either become compartmentalized or phase out entirely. You let another consciousness enter your mind. You start seeing the world the way your lover sees the world. That’s not to say that you start thinking exactly the way that they do, but you find other ways to look at the world in addition to your own. You feel their pain in a way far more empathetic than the sympathy you might feel with a friend. You grow into a unit of sorts. Individuals, but connected by something.

And if such a relationship ever dies, a part of you dies with it.

This thinking gets tricky when it comes to widows and widowers. My temptation is to say that only one soulmate can be cultivated over a lifetime, but in case of the death of a partner I don’t see why another can be found. I’m actually not a huge fan of the seeming rush remarry after becoming a widow or widower, but I wouldn’t banish those unfortunate enough to have a spouse die to forever being alone.

That actually leads into another idea for a post that’s percolating in my mind: How can one fall in love again when one starts off loving their partner considerably less than they love someone else? Check back at some point in the next week or two*, different bat-time, same bat-channel.

* - Actually, check back quite frequently cause I enjoy having people read my writing because I’m vain that way.

The war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray was supposed to be a long-fought one, lasting at least until 2009… but barely surviving into 2008 as Blu-Ray declared victory.

I’m more than a little surprised, actually. Sony (Blu-Ray’s chief proponent) is coming off a long stream of format war losses and I didn’t think mandating it onto the PS3 was a good idea since it jacked up the PS3 price something fierce and hurt sales tremendously (I read somewhere the PS2 outsold the PS3 during the Christmas after the PS3’s debut). Goes to show what I know. I didn’t think the superior technology of the Blu-Ray would carry the day.

Other than the sting of being so wrong, I’m glad about Sony’s victory. Mostly because Blu-Ray is an awesome name and HD-DVD is practically a tongue-twister as well as the superior storage ability of the Blu-Ray (though I’m told HD-DVD had better features, which the Blu-Ray may or may not add in with the next generation).

Anyhow, I read an interesting article in the paper this morning (which doesn’t appear to be online) about how it’s a great idea to go out and buy an HD-DVD while you still can. Here is the gyst of the article in Q & A form (italics are mine and were not represented in the article):

Why would someone want to invest in a dying format?
It’s dirt cheap. The formerly $500 player is now being sold for $50 or so in clearance sales.

Why not pay extra and get a format that’s gonna… you know… be around in six months?
It’s a mistake to think of buying the HD-DVD in place of a Blu-Ray. Instead, think of it like buying a new DVD player.

Why not just buy a new DVD player? Or use my existing one?
It’ll be able to play all of the old DVDs, of course, but it’ll also play HD-DVDs, which, incidentally, are on clearance as well. There are currently almost 400 titles released on HD-DVD with more to come (contractual obligations) and a lot of them are going to be sold dirt cheap. I stopped by a rental place and they were selling 4 for $10. At some locations, the players are coming with movies for free to get them off the shelves.

So are you, Will Truman, going to go out and by one?
What are you crazy? The format is dying! Once the player breaks (and everything I own always breaks) the movies I’ve purchased will be useless. Besides, I’m all set up on the DVD player front having one more than I need (if you count the PS2). Oh yeah, and I don’t own an HDTV and don’t plan to get one any time soon.

On a lot of TV shows, they make a big deal out of the 100th and 200th show. Sometimes they’ll put something in to mirror the event, like Frasier which placed his 1000th radio show on the show’s 100th and so on. Sometimes they’ll have a flashback to before the series got started or something like that. Sometimes, though, they make a big deal out of the 100th show by making it suck. They’ll just have flashbacks to episodes that we’ve already seen or they’ll interview the cast and they’ll all laugh at jokes that even a laughtrack would have trouble with.

So in honor of a stupid television convention, I’m going to make this post suck. I’m going to do flashbacks to important moments in this blog.

On February 22, 2005*, I sat in front of a keyboard and wrote the first post on Hit Coffee, which was then hosted on blogspot. Close your eyes and imagine me doing that.

On April 10, 2005, I sat in front of my keyboard and wrote the first post on the new Wordpress-powered Hit Coffee. Much like this Very Special 1000th post, it said absolutely nothing of consequence.

On April 12, 2005, I sat in front of my keyboard and wrote the 100th post. It actually dealt with anniversaries, so was not entirely inappropriate to the occasion.

On January 29, 2007, I sat in front of my keyboard and wrote the 500th post.

On February 27, 2008, I sat in front of my keyboard and wrote this post, a useless 1000th post detailing the exciting and dramatic** life of sitting in front of a keyboard and writing posts. I hope that you all are duly excited.

* - Ironically, I’ve been mulling over a retrospective on the Hit Coffee and the directions it’s taken over the last three years because of a meme I got tagged with a couple months ago. That might have made a more interesting post and a more useless one (is there anything less entertaining than a blogger talking about his blogging?), which would have made it triply appopriate. That would have taken too much time, though, and so you got this. If I’d thought this through more, I would have done a third anniversary spectacular and a 1000th vote special and have driven away every last reader that I have.

** - Also ironically, this blog can be very dramatic at times. This site has caused quite a bit of drama recently.

Yesterday was a glorious day. I got a message from my computer saying that my password was due to expire in 14 days.

The password on my computer is an awful one. It’s two words followed by a couple of letters. That shouldn’t be a problem, but it’s a relatively new one in my rotation so my fingers aren’t used to it and it’s not a particularly easy thing to type. I’ve mistyped this password more frequently than I have mistyped any password I’ve ever had.

But no more. I can finally go back to the beginning of the rotation. Yes, yes, I could have gone back to the beginning of my rotation at any point, but it just felt wrong to change my password before 3.5 months. It felt like I was giving up. I hate giving up, especially on the meaningless things.

My phone at work also requires periodic password changes. Unlike the computer which requires a rotation of 6 passwords, I only have to change it to something new. I basically go back and forth between two number combinations. The first is my old ATM pin number and the new is the pin number I’ve been using since I realized that too many people knew the relevence of the first ATM pin number. I never know which my password is at any given time and I always seem to get it wrong. On the rare occasion that I have a message to check, the time is up and I have to change it again anyway. By the time I’m done, I’ve typed both passwords at least a couple of times. Typically just so that I can get a message from a creditor trying to contact my predecessor. Man, that guy owes a lot of people a lot of money.

A few weeks back, I and a couple friends went to Friday’s for dinner, led by one’s hankering for a Jack Daniels-laden steak. The conversation was nice enough until all of us noticed the booth just-not-quite on the other side of the aisle from us.

The couple in the booth couldn’t have looked more different. She was blonde, about 5′2″, slender without being a twig, and dressed up quite nicely (black jacket/skirt, low-cut grey blouse, earrings/necklace, heels, etc). He was obviously either military or wannabe-military: jeans, green exercise-grade t-shirt, camo hat. I say perhaps wannabe-military because he didn’t look old enough to be ex-military and his physique didn’t look like someone who’d been to boot camp or in the field any time recently - he had very little muscle tone in his arms/waist area and the definite start of some moobs.

As the evening wound on, it became more and more awkward not to watch them and listen. Not that listening was really avoidable as far as the woman was concerned; far from it, she seemed to be the only one talking, rather energetically about her job and career and things going on in her life while she seemed to be under the impression he was interested. He, meanwhile, was the precise polar opposite; he barely said a word, slouched away from her, looked visually on the verge of dozing off, tended to look away from her rather than paying attention to her while she talked, and on at least 5 occasions during ~1.5 hours checked his watch.

When he left for the bathroom, all three of us posited (in hushed terms) the plausibility of walking over and informing the lady of our observations.

Ultimately, nobody did. We recognized that the girl was basically being used, because it was obvious to anyone watching that the guy was simply waiting for her to tire herself out talking so they could go back to (his place? her place? cheap motel?) and have sex. On the other side, though, the girl had just gotten into talking about which gum she liked to chew most, and showed no signs of running out of topics anytime soon… and anyways, if both of them were that desperate for some physical contact, far be it from us to shatter either’s carefully nurtured illusions about the other.

I will be responding to comments relatively slowly this upcoming week because of a fierce deadline at work, so be patient and even if it looks like I’m not reading and responding please continue to comment as you always have.

When I was in college, I had an internet friend in Canada named Michael that was getting married and I was invited to attend. He and I had never met, and we figured that it would be neat to meet right beforehand. Considering how insanely stressful a wedding is (I would later find out), it was really impressive that he invited me to be a part of it and to even stay with his parents. I was a not-rich college student at the time and the air fare alone was going to take a chunk out of my savings. Everything was more-or-less going to be handled at their end. Not knowing anything about Toronto, as I guest I was more or less going to go where they told me to go and do what they told me to do.

When I got in line, customs gave me a little card asking me what all I brought with me. No fruit, no tobacco, nothing that should cause me any problems. Except, as it turned out, my laptop. I brought my laptop because it was a new toy to play with and I didn’t know how much downtime I would need to amuse myself. I’d bought it a month before for $1,900 and added a $225 network card. That put it in the “over $2,000″ category. I considered lying and saying that it wasn’t worth 2,000, but I didn’t want to get into any trouble so I filled it out.

Once I got to the front of the line, the college-age clerk took my little customs card and started waiving it around. Her manager, a 30ish year old guy with a crew cut, came over to ask me a few questions.

“Why did you bring the laptop?”

“I figured that I might have some downtime when I was here and didn’t want to be bored.”

“It says here that you’re not here on business. What would you be doing with the laptop?”

“I don’t know, this and that. Playing around with it. Doing some writing.”

“Professional writing?”

Technically, it was so. I was a columnist for the Daily Packer, our student newspaper, and got paid $8 a column. I didn’t plan to write any columns while I was there, but it was possible that I might. I decided not to fill him in on that. “No.”

“What kind of writing, then?”

“I’ve been collecting my thoughts on experiences I’ve had and writing them down.” It was basically the kind of things that I would have posted on if I were a blogger at the time.

“I see, well I’m going to need to you to get in this line and speak to a customs representative.

“Okay.”

After waiting in line behind a guy that was literally carrying a cage with a rooster in it, I got to talk to the customs representative. After repeating almost word for word the conversation about the laptop, she asked, “So what are you doing in Canada, Mr. Truman?”

“I’m going to a wedding.”

“Whose wedding.”

“My friend Michael’s.”

“Michael Who?”

“Uhmmm… heh… his name is Michael Keaton*, actually.”

She gave me an extremely skeptical look. “Michael Keaton the actor?”

“No, Michael Keaton the marketing representative in Oshawa. This guy is Michael Keaton. The guy you’re talking isn’t actually named Michael Keaton.” I talk a lot when I’m nervous.

“What?”

“Michael Keaton isn’t actually Michael Keaton. It’s Michael Douglas. Since there was already somebody going by the name of Michael Douglas, he chose his mother’s maiden name, which is Keaton.”

“So your friend’s name is Michael Douglas?”

“No, my Michael’s name is Michael Keaton. The real Michael Keaton’s name is Michael Douglas.”

“So your Michael Keaton is not real?”

“Wait, no! My Michael Keaton is real. His name is really Michael Keaton. Michael Keaton the actor’s name is really Michael Douglas.”

“So who’s Michael Douglas?”

“Michael Douglas Michael Douglas is Kirk Douglas’s son. The guy who acted in The American President. The Michael Keaton who is really Michael Douglas is the guy from Batman and Beetlejuice. My Michael Keaton is a guy whose real name is Michael Keaton.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry about it. All that matters here is that I have a friend named Michael that is getting married and whose wedding I’m here to attend.”

“Where is this wedding?”

“Uhmmm… Ontario? Somewhere in Toronto, I think.”

“Where in Toronto?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the name of the woman he’s marrying?”

“I keep forgetting it. It’s something French. Four letters, I think?”

“When is the wedding?”

“I don’t know, to be honest.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to find out when I meet up with him.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He’s probably in the lobby waiting for me. I’m sure he can tell you where the wedding is, when it is, and who he’s marrying. You might want to try paging him.” I thought about it for a moment and realized something. “Actually, he may not be out there?”

“Where might he be?”

“I don’t know. Considering that he’s getting married either tomorrow or the next day, he’s probably too busy to make the trip from Oshawa.”

“He’s in Oshawa? Is the wedding in Oshawa?”

“Hey, come to think of it, it might be! So I’d like to amend my previous statement about where the wedding is to say it’s either in Oshawa or Toronto. Definitely in Ontario, I think.”

“So you have a friend named… Michael Keaton… that’s getting married to someone somewhere at some point in the next couple of days.”

“Right!”

“And you brought a 2,000 laptop to attend this wedding.”

“Right.”

“Even though you don’t know what you’re going to be doing with the laptop?”

“Right.”

“Do you see why I’m a little bit concerned here?”

“Yeah, I guess. But somebody is waiting out there to pick me up. I’m sure that they’ll be glad to give you the information that you want.”

“But you don’t know who is out there?”

“No. It might be Michael, it might be someone else. We obviously didn’t plan this very well.”

“Obviously not.”

“So can I go?”

“No, I need you to go into that room,” she said, pointing to a room with a sign above it that said Customs Enforcement.

The next person I got to talk to was a 6′5″, 280lb officer with a big moustache and a gun. “So what is the reason for your visit to Canada, Mr. Truman?”

“I’m here for a wedding. I already went through all of this with the representative.”

“Well now you’re going to go through it all with me.” And we did, sans the misunderstanding about real and fake Michael Keatons.

“So what did you bring this laptop for?”

“Personal stuff.”

“What kind of personal stuff?”

“I don’t know, personal stuff.”

“What kind of software do you have installed on this?”

“Uhhm… Microsoft Windows ‘98, Microsoft Office ‘97, Adobe Photoshop, Winamp…”

“Do you have any diagnostic equipment on this machine?”

“Diagnostic equipment? No.”

“So you don’t have any virus scanners?”

“Oh, virus scanners? I think that it has a virus scanner.”

“Then the answer to the question of whether or not there is any diagnostic equipment is yes, Mr. Truman.”

It reminded me a bit of the eternal quote from Ghostbusters… “If someone asks you if you’re a god, you say yes.” I snickered. It did not go over well with the officer.

“Do you consider Canadian security a laughing matter?”

Canada needs security? Who wants to attack Canada? “No, sir.”

“So you brought this computer with diagnostic equipment even though you don’t have any specific intent to use it.”

“I suspect I’ll use it some.”

“To do what?”

“I don’t know. Kill time.” I regretted my word usage, but he wasn’t concerned.

“Kill time doing what?”

“I don’t know, playing solitaire.”

“So you brought a $2,000 piece of hardware complete with diagnostic equipment so that you can play solitaire on it while your friend is getting married?”

“Well, not while he’s getting married. Before and after, maybe. I mean there’s a lot of time where the groom is going to be tied up and I won’t know anyone else there…” the more I talked the more I remembered that talking just kept getting me into more and more trouble. “Yes, officer, that is exactly what I’m doing. Brought the computer to play solitaire.”

“Turn the computer on, Mr. Truman.”

I did.

“Wait here.”

He left. Forty-five minutes later, a man with a suit and tie (with a holster and gun) entered the room. “Didn’t Officer Kendall ask you to turn on your computer?”

“I did.”

“Well, it’s off now. Why is that?”

“Because there is a power saving function that turns the computer off if it’s not in use.”

“I see.”

“Okay.”

“So according to this report, you’re here for a wedding of a friend of yours. You don’t know when, where, or who to. You brought a laptop without a clear idea of what you’re going to do with it.”

“Yes.”

“Next time, try to some answers to your questions. You’re free to go.”

Michael was indeed waiting for me in the lobby. His wife was less than pleased that his entire afternoon was spent at the airport, but fortunately she believed my story about Canadian customs.

There are a couple of ironies with this story. First is that if I’d been going to Canada to do something nefarious, you can bet that I’d have a much better cover story planned. I certainly wouldn’t have named my friend Michael Keaton. The second is that for all of their interest in my laptop and the specifics of my friend’s wedding, nobody cared that my passport had the picture of a chubby ten year old on it that looked nothing like me… and that it was three years expired.

* - Before anyone asks, no his name is not Michael Keaton. His name is famous, though, and the whole real/fake goof occurred in another form.

9:00: Wake up

9:30: Contemplate breakfast, decide to make a quick trip to Wendy’s rather than go downtown for Las Migas and the best breakfast burritos around. Wendy’s stops serving breakfast at 10:30, though, so I decide to get a move on.

9:40: Leave house.

9:50: Arrive at Wendy’s. Wendy’s is closed until noon for some parking lot renovation. Head for Migas

10:10: F Street is closed, have to take detour

10:20: Detour lands me all the way back at the freeway. No Las Migas for me. Head south of town to McDonald’s.

10:31: Arrive at McDonald’s. McDonald’s no longer serving breakfast. Head to International House of Pancakes

10:40: IHOP paking lot is full and the line figuratively goes around the building. It’s the post-church crowd and it looks like there’s probably a 45 minute wait. Decide to go to Happy Burger for some of their outstanding breakfast burritos.

10:55: Get in line at the Happy Burger.

11:01: I get to the counter, the breakfast menu is closed. Would I like a hamburger? I would not. Say “screw it” and go back to IHOP

11:10: Put my name on the list.

11:35: Get table

11:55: Get omlettes for breakfast lunch

12:10: Finish lunch

I ask one thing of Harvey, my 1998 Ford Escort: Hit 200,000 miles. Interestingly enough, I hit 100,000 on a road trip from Colosse to Almeida, Estacado, the town where I now work. It is my hope that I hit 200,000 miles driving to Almeida for work.

It’s been pretty obvious for the last 15,000 miles that Harvey doesn’t have much left in him. I’ve had to put in $100 here and $100 there for repair, each time wondering if this is the time that I don’t get him fixed. One of the tough things about a car is knowing when to throw in the towel. One almost hopes for a $5,000 repair so that the choice becomes easy.

I hit 199,000 miles a couple weeks back. I can feel the 200,000th mile coming. I can also feel the car’s reluctance to cross that threshold. Lately there’s been a grinding sound when I put my foot on the accelerator. So I’ve been asking myself if I bother getting it fixed for the last 1,000 miles when I’m not going to be taking the car up to Cascadia when I move up there later this year. How much do I commit to spending per mile for that meaningless-except-to-me mile mark? It would be nice if, in addition to passing 200,000, I could hold on to the car until the move. Crayola, the car that I’ll be getting from my father as soon as Harvey passes on, is a lot less comfortable. Maybe I’ll get used to it, maybe I won’t.

I decided to go ahead and take it in to see what that grinding sound was. I worked it out with my coworker Pat that she would pick me up at the auto shop yesterday. Wouldn’t you know it that as I was driving to work, the transmission started slipping. I’d change gears and hit the accelerator and nothing would happen. Then there’d be this jerk and pop and I’d be moving. I’ve experienced this before and it typically meant that the car was on its way out. I crossed my fingers and hoped that I would get to Almeida so I could get to the auto shop. Partially so I could hit 200k, but partially because I didn’t want to break down in the middle of nowhere.

The car made it and I got the news that I was hoping for. The transmission could be cleaned out and it’d stop slipping for at least a little while, but the transmission was going to need to be replaced sometime relatively soon. The griding had something to do with the wheel bearings, and that would need a new something-or-other, but I’d be fine for the time being. So I was able to spend $200 to get the transmission cleaned, the oil changed, and the turn-bulb replaced, but I have about $1,500 worth of repairs right around the corner. The car is not worth $1,500 to replace… so when that happens, my question of when “enough is enough” to keep the car is answered for me.

200,000 and a breakdown and then that’ll pretty much be the end of Harvey.

The New York Times has a couple articles of interest and my reaction to both is surprisingly caustic.

The first is about sexy wedding dresses. My initial thought was to be grumpy at the commenters over at Half Sigma as they suggest that girls that do this sort of thing are the kinds of girls that either nobody wants to marry (which, considering that it’s an article about wedding dresses is kind of inane) and that they’re the kinds of girls that will naturally leave the men high and dry because they’re not human beings with thoughts no less egotistical or self-centered as blog commenters but rather objects to be reviled for daring to think that they’re special and/or for flaunting what they have to offer.

Then, on second thought, I don’t really disagree with their appraisal and think that the urge to hippify and modernify all our traditions is aggravating and often tacky. Mumble grumble.

Then there’s another NYT article with an irritating “Move over boys, the girls are in town!!!” feel about how women are taking over the Internet:

On the contrary, the cyberpioneers of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls.

“Most guys don’t have patience for this kind of thing,” said Nicole Dominguez, 13, of Miramar, Fla., whose hobbies include designing free icons, layouts and “glitters” (shimmering animations) for the Web and MySpace pages of other teenagers. “It’s really hard.”

Nicole posts her graphics, as well as her own HTML and CSS computer coding pointers (she is self-taught), on the pink and violet Sodevious.net, a domain her mother bought for her in October.

“If you did a poll I think you’d find that boys rarely have sites,” she said. “It’s mostly girls.”

Indeed, a study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).

By “web sites” I assume that they mean the atrociously tacky and unoriginal world of MySpace pages and the self-absorbed world of LiveJournals. Let’s leave aside for a moment the self-centered self absorbed self-expressive nature of this site that makes me an utter hypocrite. The New York Times can cite all of the anecdotes that they want about girls that offer HTML pointers. Take a look at the people that actually code the websites and develop the applications that the girls make their cute little frilly animations and graphics on and then let’s tally by gender.

Pioneers? Please. They’re second and third wave giggly dilettantes that think that filling out a form and selecting a template is creative while what boys do is laugh-worthy.

See? What did I tell you? Grum-py…

Over at Slate, brief coverage of a study that says the reason firstborns have an “IQ Edge” is that they get more time with the parents..

The study claims that the first-born child gets (averaged) 3,000-4,000 hours per year between the ages of 4 and 13. In other words, for a 10-year span, 300-400 hours more per year.

The study makes the point that as the kids grow up, there is less parenting time overall. Presumably, the parents are having kids young, and then (either as a natural progression or because the enlarged family demands it) pushing on in their careers, meaning that more time is taken away from the family as a whole and sacrificed towards making money to pay for the family’s needs. This may be especially true if someone has kids over a wider range and is supporting some through a private high school or college.

However, there’s one thing else missing from this - the fact that for better or worse, the first-born (and I am one) is forever the example that the parents will use on the other kids, and doubly so for kids of the same gender. I know my younger brother is quite sick of hearing comparisons between my situation and his. I also know that, for the same various rules transgressions/misbehaviors either of us might have engaged in, I can guarantee my punishment would have been twice as severe - and my parents even acknowledged that this was so because I was supposed to “set the example”, assuming that my younger brother would imitate things that I did (and implicitly, therefore, holding me proactively responsible for his misdeeds).

By the same regard, however, the firstborn is therefore pushed to achieve more. Somewhat to my dismay, I’ve lost count of the number of conversations in which my mother or father insisted that my brother ought to be able to do something that I could do, either currently or something that I was capable in when we were the same age. My attending college is probably the main reason my brother did, though he drifted through much of it since I went out of state and he didn’t.

Overall, I’m not sure who got the better end of the stick. I can guarantee both of my siblings could get away with a heck of a lot more than I ever could, and some of my parents’ pushing was ill-advised, but according to this study I got more “quality time” than my sibs did.

Different jobs take up different percentages of your brainpower. A job that takes 100% of it 100% of the time will tend to burn you out pretty quickly, even if you only work 40 hours a week. A job that takes 10% of it 90% of the time are often too boring to survive unless you can find something to do with the remaining 90% of your brainpower. I typically define something taking 80% of your brainpower if you can’t talk to anyone else or listen to anything while your working because it will prove too distracting. In the 60-80% range you can listen to music, but anything with words might mess you up. In the 30-60% range you can listen to music while you do it though you don’t necessarily need to be doing something else (though at lower levels it helps). In the 0-30% range, you need something else to keep your mind occupied while you work and you can even be doing more contemplative things while you work like thinking about world events, watching television, or talking to a coworker.

My current job only requires 5-20% of my thoughts 70% of the time. This would be miserable, except that they let me listen to things while I work. They let me do the same in Deseret, where it was 20-40% of my brainpower 95% of the time. In both cases, keeping the rest of my mind occupied helps keep me on task because it prevents me from doing something that takes too much attention away from my work, such as surfing the Internet.

This past year or so has really worked out very nicely for me, given the givens. I don’t like my job all that much and don’t get much in the way of personal satisfaction through it, but it gives me room to do things that make my day a lot more entertaining than it might be if I was at a job that required more of my brain. A year or so ago I bought a Pocket PC as a stand-in for an iPod solely so that I could listen to stuff while I worked. I started with music, but before long I figured out that I could listen to television shows and podcasts of the audio and video varieties.

It has turned into a marvelous investment. So much so that when it broke, I had no problem justifying the purchase of another. Not only do I get to listen while I’m at work, but I can also listen while I clean up around the apartment, while I’m going shopping, and while I’m doing anything that doesn’t require all that much of my attention. It makes a lot of boring stretches in my day go by faster and it allows me to “watch” television shows that I’d otherwise never get to see (or at least wouldn’t get to see starting at the beginning all the way to the ending).

You might be surprised how many television shows you can just listen to. Most sitcoms are listenable unless they’re gag-oriented. Most humor is in dialogue and even when there is something funny that’s not dialogue, you can picture in your mind what’s going on. Dramas are a bit more spotty, particularly if there’s a lot going on. The Sopranos, for instance, is far too visual, as is science fiction like Battlestar Gallactica. Thus far I have only had to abandon two shows due to it being excessively visual. About halfway through the first season I stopped listening to Las Vegas. When I don’t have anything else to listen to I’ll give it a shot, but about half of the episodes there are stretches where I really don’t know what’s going on. the same is true for Third Rock From The Sun, which is more visual than I would have thought. I can follow the plot, but I’m missing out on more of the humor.

I know that I’m missing stuff on other shows, too. The toughest one that I’ve gotten through was Homicide, Life on the Street. I managed to get through it, but sometimes I’d realize about halfway through that someone had died or I’d missed some big event. Nonetheless, it’s surprising how my mind is able to put a lot of it together. Music helps a lot. I can never see characters kissing, for instance, but I can often tell by the music alone.

Every now and again there will be some episode that I will have to skip. This happens particularly in sitcoms. There was an episode of Frasier where no one spoke for the first twelve minutes, an episode of Two Guys and a Girl where no one spoke at all, a couple episodes of How I Met Your Mother where subtitles are used extensively, and an episode of The Drew Carey Show where the characters are speaking gibberish and what they mean is on display on comic-style bubbles. There are also various points at which something other than English is being spoken, though most of the time you can figure out what’s going on regardless.

Sometimes I feel bad knowing that I’m missing some visual gags or there’s something going on in the episode that I am missing, but for the most part it’s unlikely that I would get the opportunity to watch these shows all the way through if I didn’t do it this way. It’s better to catch 90% of a show than miss out on it entirely. Sometimes after listening to an important episode, I’ll go home and watch it.

Below is a list of all of the shows that I’ve listened to more-or-less in the order that I’ve listened to them in. Sometimes I’ll have two shows going on in parallel because I’ll want to switch to a comedy because I’m having a depressing day but once I am in a better mood I want to go back to a more gripping drama. Also, when about to finish one show, I’ll frequently start another show before the last season so that when I finish the first show, I’m already entrenched in the second show. For instance, I started listening to Just Shoot Me prior to watching the last season of The West Wing.

NewsRadio (All 5 seasons)
Frasier (All 11 seasons)
Cheers (Half of first season)
SportsNight (Both seasons)
The West Wing (All 7 seasons)
Just Shoot Me (All 7 seasons)
Profit (All 9 episodes)
Two Guys and a Girl (All 4 seasons)
Friends (All 10 seasons)
Seinfeld (First 3 seasons)
The Practice (All 8 seasons)
Boston Legal (Up to current)
Ally McBeal (Seasons 1-4*)
Las Vegas (First seventeen episodes)
Homicide, Life on the Street (Seasons 3-7*)
Felicity (Two episodes)
Brothers & Sisters (One episode)
Third Rock From The Sun (Much of first two seasons)
The Drew Carey Show (Up to Season 6)
Spin City (Still in Season 1)

* - I watched the first two seasons of Homicide on the exercise bike before switching to listening to it at work. I had to watch the fifth and final season of Ally McBeal because they were in a format that wouldn’t play on my Pocket PC.

-{This is the expanded version of the opening of a post that I wrote for Bobvis}-

There were three serious Democrats running in 1966. The first was progressive former governor Ellis Arnall. The second was a young state senator named Jimmy Carter. The third was Lester Maddox, a three-time loser in electoral politics that got a lot of publicity for closing down his restaurant rather than be forced to serve blacks. As was commonly the case, Republicans did not have a seriously contested primary. Uncommonly, though, they had a chance at winning the election in the form of Bo Calloway, the first Republican congressman since reconstruction.

The Republicans felt that Calloway had the best chance of beating the inarticulate radical Maddox than the Arnall or moderate Carter, so Republicans one and all decided to vote in the Democratic primaries to serve up the weakest Democrat to face off against what they hoped would be the first Republican governor since reconstruction. Carter was bumped off in the original election and though he won a plurality in the first round, Arnall was put out to pasture by Maddox with the help of the Calloway voters.

The Arnall voters, however, weren’t ready to call it quits. Maddox was an embarrassment and Calloway himself wasn’t good on the issue of segregation, so they hatched a plan of their own. They sponsored an Arnall write-in campaign. Though they knew that they couldn’t win with a write-in candidate, they reasoned that they didn’t have to. If they could prevent either Calloway or Maddox from getting a majority of the vote, the winner would be determined by a vote in the state legislature. Since the legislature was Democratic, they figured that they might be able to get enough Republicans and anti-Maddox Democrats together to pull off a victory.

Arnall ended up with 7.01% of the vote, managing to keep both Calloway (47.07%) and Maddox (46.88%) from getting a majority of the popular vote. By an overwhelming majority, the state legislature tapped Lester Maddox as the next governor of the state of Georgia. Governor Maddox surprisingly turned in a moderate record as governor as far as race issues in the south went, appointing record numbers of blacks into state office and integrating various state agencies, though never renouncing his staunchly segregationist views. He later ran for president under the banner of George Wallace’s American Independence Party.

Arnall never for public office again and Calloway left Georgia in the 1970’s. Jimmy Carter succeeded Maddox as the governor of Georgia, serving from 1971-1975, and went on to run for higher office.

The subject of love and alphas and betas has resurfaced in a series of posts recently at Bobvis. Whenever Spungen posts on the subject and mentions the former bane of her existence, Beemus, someone almost invariably steps forward to try to spin a positive light on Beemus or paint Spungen in a negative light.

The question is… why? Why are a lot of guys reluctant to take Spungen’s word for it that Beemus is worthy of the contempt that she trusts upon him?

Part of it is related to the Alpha Theory, wherein a lot of guys believe that there are Alphas and Betas. The former group is accomplished, but self-centered and likely to treat women poorly. The latter would treat women great if they could but can’t get them, and if they treat women poorly we may need to turn the blame back on the woman because he’s earned his bitterness by the poor way that they’ve treated him. This is the most radical interpretation of the theory, but aspects of it pour into how a lot of guys view relationships. It’s one of the forces behind the “Women prefer assholes to nice guys” theory.

I think that there’s more to it than that. If some guys are inclined to apply some moral value or victimhood to those that have difficulty getting a date, some women are inclined to apply moral value to being desirable. Or being desired by them at any rate. I’ve seen on numerous occasions where women will take a guy that they like for some reason that they aren’t particularly proud of (he’s hot, he’s charismatic, he’s popular) and they will paint him positively in characteristics that she feels that she should be looking at (he’s smart, he’s generous, he’s hard working) whether he’s earned it or not. Why? For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that she is expected to have honorable and noble reasons for being attracted to him in ways that guys aren’t expected to focus on anything but looks.

That’s only part of it, though. The other part of it is that it’s human nature. Guys do the same thing. We apply intelligence or maturity to women that we are attracted to for more superficial reasons. If we are treated poorly by them, we’re just as good as women are for coming up for ways to excuse their behavior. Case and point, during my time with Evangeline she would show up to a date four or five hours late, with her sister that wasn’t supposed to be coming along, and announcing that she only had an hour or so before she had to go to bed because she had plans the next morning… and I felt bad if I was angry about this mistreatment.

That some women make excuses for poor behavior is not part of some conspiracy to keep the lonely guys lonely, it’s not indicative of an attraction to those characteristics, and it’s not exclusive to women.

Nonetheless, this is interpreted by some guys as women crowding around the alpha at their expense. As such, anything that seems to demonstrate thinking along these lines — that the handsome, accomplished, charismatic, and popular guys she’s attracted to are good guys and inversely that the guys that she’s not attracted to are bad guys — sets a number of guys off. It suggests that the guys that get dates aren’t just better looking and whatnot than they are, but that women view them as better people and thus view them as worse people. If a guy reads a woman’s comments that way, it’s not surprising that they react with hostility.

So why do a lot of guys read it that way, especially when there’s no evidence at all that’s what she means? Why are Spungen’s indictments of Beemus considered indictments of all unlucky-in-love men unless expressly stated otherwise (or, in some cases, even when Spungen does express otherwise)?

The answer, I think, is paranoia.

For a lot of guys, including almost all of those that ascribe to the Alpha Theories, asking out a girl or making a pass at her is one of the most difficult things that he will be asked to do. It is an extremely difficult thing to be thoroughly rejected. The idea of having nothing to lose by asking someone out is undermined by the loss of respect that he believes that he will get in her eyes. He goes from being invisible to being expressly unworthy. No matter how adept the rejection, that hurts. We can alleviate this hurt one of a couple of ways: we can shift the blame to her or we can try to imagine that we may have been rejected but we weren’t severely demoted in their eyes, we’re just not what they were looking for.

It can be tough to convince ourselves of the latter. It’s tough not to feel a fool or to feel pathetic when we just got dissed by someone we thought might be interested. A lot of guys will be sensitive to any threats to that illusion. Unfortunately they will weave threats into that illusion into fabric where it doesn’t belong. They will read a quite reasonable post by Spungen about a guy that is worthy of contempt and they will say to themselves, “Dammit, I knew it! That’s what that girl I asked out was really thinking about me. Dammit dammit dammit!!” then there’s the inclination to turn back to the other way to alleviate the hurt… “she’s the contemptible one!” and from there they will go into attack mode.

This is unhelpful on a number of levels. He’s needlessly angry. She’s being attacked for saying something that she didn’t say and for making him think of the (perceived, possibly with no root in reality) actions or attitudes of someone other than her. She’s discouraged from voicing ideas that, if guys were to read it more calmly and coolly, might genuinely be helpful to understanding why women sometimes act the way that they do. Other women are also deprived of the warnings that Spungen wants to issue about guys that will attempt to manipulate women by pretending to be victims when they’re not.

So the question is… how can we short-circuit this unhelpful logic? I wish I knew. It’s unfortunately rooted into the insecurity of the guys reading it. From the guy’s perspective it all seems so logical, especially when other guys seem to be seeing the same thing. There’s a saying that we don’t see things as they are we see them as we are. We, male and female, often have a lot of difficulty evaluating what other people are saying through anything but our own eyes and the perceptions of our own experiences.

I think about my own sons, if ever I have them, and what I might say to them if anything. I would very much like to give them more social guidance than I got growing up, though whether they’d listen or not is up for debate. I think that it’ll start with the advice not to become bitter. That’s a pretty tall order, so I might whittle that down to trying not to see the world through bitter eyes. Trust your instincts and knowledge in situations when you might be vulnerable, but try not to relate everything you see and experience to your own hurt, fear, and anger.

Sometimes nothing can make you laugh like a tragedy and nothing can make you sadder than a comedy. When I look at the movies and shows that have hit me the hardest emotionally, almost all of them have been comedies or at least a weaving of comedy and drama. The thing about a drama is that you expect it to tug at your emotional strings. You’re prepared for it. Just like The West Wing gets laughs out of jokes that wouldn’t work as well on a bona fide comedy, sitcoms can smack you with a sudden seriousness because there is a laughter that’s stuck in your throat.

Comic book writer Peter David said the following of his writing (on X-Factor specifically, though it applies to his work on Young Justice and Supergirl):

The humor in the book will arise naturally from character interaction. Also, it will serve to set up the serious moments. Alfred Hitchcock said the best type of laughter from an audience is the type that catches in their throats. So although there will be snappy dialogue and such, be aware that sometimes we’ll be in the midst of what seems like a humorous moment and then, bam, something unexpected happens that leaves the reader going “Whoa. Didn’t see that coming.”

I’m including two examples in this post. The first is a scene from Frasier that I have actually commented before. The first time I saw it I was slightly inebriated, making the funny scenes funnier and the sad scenes sadder. I wanted to yell and throw something at the TV at the close of the episode.

The set-up is thus: When Daphne breaks up with her boyfriend, Niles is about ready to make his move. He holds off for a day at Frasier’s urging and that night Daphne meets a man, Rodney, who could pass for Niles’s twin. The actor for Rodney was amazing in his ability to duplicate Niles’s mannerisms. If Niles had only made his move, he could have caught the woman of his dreams. Niles moves on and meets Adelle, but not long after discovers that Rodney and Adelle have fallen for one another. This scene takes place towards at end, when Niles shows up to tell Daphne about Rodney and Adelle.

The second is from The Drew Carey Show, which I only saw recently. I actually listened to this before I watched it, but I happened to be at lunch at the end of the episode, so I got to see the all-important closing of the episode. After catching the end, I watched the whole episode through when I got home.

The set-up is thus: Several episodes before, Drew met a real estate agent named Nicki and they (eventually) started to date. Though she’s thin when they met, Nicki revealed to Drew early on that she had previously had a weight problem. She gains weight as the series progresses, but Drew doesn’t care and he proposes to her. This episode opens with Drew and Nicki filming a sex video. It forwards to the next morning where Drew informs his parents that “something happened” and he decided that he didn’t want to marry Nicki anymore. In this scene, he’s coming home from the bachelor party.

(note: there are some jokes in the first 40 seconds that you may not understand. They involve Drew’s father finding out about Drew’s cross-dressing brother and his attempting to feign depression to get out of yard work)

I’ve fallen way behind on responding to comments. My apologies. I think I’m caught up, so if you had a comment that you expected a response for (or that I never respond to, since I respond to about 80%), I’ve probably responded.

I never had a whole lot of success when it came to girls until later than most guys. Some of it was the weight problems that plagued me and my natural introversion, but a lot of it had to do with a complete ignorance of what girls noticed about guys and what control I had over the perception of me. My luck had been so rotten that I was under the impression that it was all about luck and that I needed to figure out how to get some luck. For the most part this came down to trying to figure out who to target. Who might be interested in me? Find them and I would be set. It was all quite frustrating.

What I didn’t realize was that my behavior had a whole lot to do with whether anyone would find me attractive. Even little things mattered in ways that I am not sure that the girls always realized. One example was that throughout junior high and early high school, I carried a 40-lb schoolbag. That meant that when girls saw me in the hallway, I was uncomfortably slouching. When I happened to see myself on campus news lugging my bag around, I realized how bad I looked and swapped out the bohemeth bag for a smaller one and swapped my books at lunch time.

You wouldn’t think that would make much of a difference, but it did. The very next week three girls commented to me that I looked “different” (they obviously meant this in a good way) and after thinking about it, two of them were able to point their finger at the bag.

I needed some help for the next part. At some point a girl that I knew pulled me off to the side and said that she needed to talk to me. I’d sort of asked this girl out and she had declined, so I didn’t get any ideas or anything except that maybe she knew somebody. When we talked, she said that she had been a part of a few conversations that some girls were having about me. There was something of a consensus that I was really sweet and “kind of cute or really cute”… but there was a problem. Simply put, I smelled.

Cleanliness has never been a big thing for me. I have never had much ability to smell and I’m gloriously obtuse to dirtiness. At the time, I showered maybe once every couple of days. I never washed my hair. I rarely brushed my teeth and never flossed. Perhaps most importantly, I never wore deodorant and antiperspirant. In the southern sun, that can be brutal.

My first reaction to what the girl said to me was defensiveness. Why was she being so mean to me, picking on me for my smell? Wasn’t she my friend? People had told me that I smelled before, but it was always people that didn’t like me. The same sort of people that would tell me that I smelled even if I didn’t or if they didn’t harp on my smell they would harp on something else. Was she just another one of them.

I thought about it some more and I realized that she really had no hostile motivation. She was actually saying this as a friend. Then I felt bad for a different reason: how many opportunities had I missed because of lack of hygiene and poor grooming? I’d been embarrassing my self, smelling up the room. I thought about the girls in the conversation that apparently found some endearing things to say about me and how I’d screwed it up. What was the point in showering now? It was already too late. Then, once I got over that, I realized that I would presumably be meeting other people in the future and it’d be best if I met them in a non-smelly state.

I can understand why everyone else was so silent about it, but I appreciate her willingness to upset me by telling me something that I obviously needed to hear. Guys often talk about how they want girls to be honest with them, but our track record of responding well when they are honest is not good. We value pride over honesty much of the time. I feel very fortunate that I was in a place that I could hear the truth and respond to it constructively.

A great many technological items that I have today, I own because I have been able to acquire them fairly inexpensively.

However, many of them are available in “equally cheap” (as in inexpensive) models that combine various aspects. Sound systems are most commonly combined with a DVD player and amp in one, routers incorporate wireless access points, etc.

The upside to these combined units? Price. However, in buying older-model, used, and otherwise perfectly serviceable units in need of minor repair, I’ve managed to acquire all the things I might want, with an added bonus of security.

The way I see my setup: if one function dies (or is rendered obsolete), I only need to replace that function. As an added corrolary, I also need not stop using the rest of the devices.

I recently upgraded my network to Gigabit, requiring me to replace my router and two network switches. The upside of this was that I was able to do it “on the cheap”; one other switch going only to 100-base devices could be left alone, and I didn’t have to re-create my wireless network setup since the wireless AP is a secondary device.

Should my router die, it’s actually possible for me to reconfigure the wireless AP to function as a DHCP server and run the wired stuff.

If my DVD player goes out (as my Xbox360 is currently in the shop)? My sound system is still running just fine. I can attach a spare DVD player with no issues.

If my Dolby decoder goes down? I can still use the speakers on my TV to watch DVD’s, TV, and play games until I get it replaced.

I consider this to be smart design. Yes, it means a couple extra plugs into the power strip, but I’m prepared for any upgrades/changes and repairs down the line. Then again, I know far too many people who bought TV/VCR and TV/DVD combo units only to have the VCR or DVD portion break.

There is a movie theater in Santomas that plays episodes of Lost and 24 live when they’re on the air. They legally can’t charge for entry for TV shows, but you get in with a $5 food voucher. This is one of those theaters where you can order food (popcorn, pizza, nachos, etc) and drinks (soft drinks and bottled or draft beer) from your seat. If you’ve never been to one, I recommend it. I never want to go to a regular theater again.

The problem is that the theater is in a very confusing part of town. It was a good thing that I left straight from work, because it took me about 90 minutes or so to get there. Some of that is because I was trying to use backroads during rush hour and I was driving a car where changing lanes to the left was really difficult because my turn signal was out. I should have known better. I got there at 6:30 and wouldn’t you know it, they were “sold” out. I thought about catching a movie while I was there, but wouldn’t you know it all four screens were sold out for the next two showings. On a weeknight, no less. If I could invest in these theaters, I would.

I got a burger at a nearby restaurant and headed home. I don’t know about you, but one thing I hate, hate, hate when driving is turning around and going the way I came. My drive home started with my being in the wrong lane. Any sane and rational person would have turned their butt around because I knew that by missing that turn I was going to head into a weird intersection where I was forced to take a right and would have to double back around to get back to the Interstate, which I knew that I would never do because I am somehow incapable of just taking a U-turn because I always think that I can navigate my way home.

So I went straight. Then I took the forced right. Then I took a left at a street that I knew lead to the interstate. Then I took a right at a road that I thought was going to lead straight to the Interstate. Somehow this right-left-right combination ended me up right back at the theater I had left forty minutes earlier.

This time I took the left that I needed to take, took a right on Interstate A and then another right on the interchange to Interstate A to Interstate B, and got home.

Without doubling back even once.

I rock.

A while back I announced that I was not impressed with the TV show Lost. A couple seasons later, though, I’m still watching it and even feel the need to defend it against a lot of naysayers. My main fear with the show was that the writers didn’t know what they were doing with it. It felt like X-Files all over again wherein we’re going to invest hundreds of hours into something that wouldn’t satisfy us. Ironically, at about the same time more people were coming to that point of view and losing faith in the writers, I started gaining faith in the writers. At least insofar as their planning is concerned.

X-Files, though it had a lot of story arcs, was nonetheless mostly single episodes about single things. It had tons and tons of writers and it lacked cohesion in pretty obvious ways. One week it was like “Are there aliens or aren’t there?” then the next week there’d be an obviously alien bounty hunter and then the week after that Scully would be skeptical of all of Mulder’s claims. Lost isn’t like that at all. They’ll drop a nugget in episode four of a season and then pick up and explain it in episode ten. There is more cohesion in Lost than I have ever seen on any television show with all of these threads weaving from episode to episode.

I still have my problems with the show, though. The acting is mostly unremarkable. The dialogue is atrocious at points and the characters range from one-dimensional to cloying a lot of the time. While they’ve done a great job giving characters all of these backstories, they haven’t given the characters the personality to match. Jack Shepard is the strong-willed leader and his characterization really never goes beyond that. Most comic books do better. Even the interesting characters, such as John Locke, are driven more by their circumstances than they are by their presence.

With the stark contrast between the outstanding plotting and poor script writing, it feels like a couple of guys wrote their magnum opus in the story outline, but then handed the day-to-day scriptwriting to their unemployed in-laws.

But I’m not going anywhere and I am impatient with the impatience of others. It seems like every new week someone is losing faith that they’re going anywhere with it all. In fact, it seems almost like a race to declare who can be the first one to declare that they’re being strung along. The show has been declared to have jumped and unjumped the shark repeatedly, sometimes by the same people. I just want to say that because you’re not getting the answers now doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get them.

That being said, I don’t think we’re going to get all of them. Freddie’s comment here encapsulates a lot of why I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed:

And, of course, there is the simple question of the endgame: what possible “secret” could sum up the show, answer the fundamental questions, in a way that satisfies? I can’t imagine one. Remember when the show first came out, when everyone had a theory— they were dead and in the afterlife; the island was a government conspiracy; etc. What possible single secret could now exist that provides anything like a satisfactory answer to the shows questions? How could any one thing explain all of the bizarre turns the story has taken, and not conflict with previous continuity? And if there is no single answer, but rather a string of small answers that have no narrative unity, well, that’s X-Files territory: a seemingly broken promise of an interesting and meaningful solution to a mystery.

It’s almost certain at this point that there is no single secret. Do we really want to watch 100 hours of television for a single secret? The writers have even been blunt that it won’t boil town to a single answer to every question, which I think is a good thing. I would be disappointed if it turned out that they were all in purgatory or some singular answer like that. People looking for that kind of answer are definitely going to be disappointed.

Also disappointed are folks that are going to want a scientific answer for every question. We may never find out precisely where the sentience of the black cloud is or how precisely the characters skirt death, how the ghosts came to be, and so on. It’s quite likely that the answer to some questions is going to be “magic” and that the specific answers are going to be reserved for how institutions such as Dharma and Mittelos try to contain, exploit, or manage the supernatural aspects of it. So in that sense, a lot of the skeptics are likely right and a lot of people are going to leave disappointed.