I'll Be Back

Or rather, I am back. My Facebook absence was short-lived. But it gave me the opportunity to really consider why I was there in the first place. I enjoy keeping in touch with some of the people I've met in my life who are no longer in close enough proximity to visit me in meat space. I think curiosity got the better of me more often than it should have and I allowed more people to become my "friend" than I should have. I just wasn't comfortable around many of them anymore, even as a digital avatar. It became a high school reunion rather than a way to stay in contact with better friends. Moving forward, I will try to be more selective and also a better human being now that I understand a few more things about myself.

I Did It!

I quit Facebook. I was always trying to cope with these old feelings of inadequacy. I'd check my profile to see if people were commenting on anything I had to say. When nobody was paying attention, I'd feel rejected. It was ridiculous. Those feelings are ridiculous and I'm better off without them. When I realized that I felt like I was fifteen again, I knew things were out of proportion. I know that nobody was ignoring me on purpose or trying to make me feel bad. That line of thought is also ridiculous. But somehow, I still kept coming back to those same feelings, my emotions kept getting the better of me.

It's going to be a little hard to leave it behind. I enjoyed the initial voyeuristic excitement of getting a new friend (ding, gratz!) and leafing through their profile. Was I comparing myself against them? Not outright. But after a while, in my own mind, I think it did become a game. It was a game to see who could maintain the most profile traffic. In that context, I was losing hardcore. That, in turn, made me feel bad about myself. Just like I did in high school. I don't need that. Nobody needs that.

Once I came to that conclusion, there really was only one clear option. It was time to shut the profile down. It's not that I don't like those people. I do. There was almost always a reason why I either proffered myself to be their friend or accepted their own offer. But I hadn't talked to most of the people on my friend list for probably a decade or more. Once we said, "Hello! What are doing these day?", what more was there to talk about?

More concerning to me were my feelings when a friend that I had always considered "a very good friend" didn't talk to me a whole lot. They had new friends, people who are actually a part of their daily lives. That made me feel bad until I realized that I did too. However, I'll admit that a big part of my fascination with Facebook stemmed from uprooting my entire life this past year. I craved something, anything familiar.

Yes, some of those old friends are still around. I still see certain people when I visit PA. Those of you old-timers who stop by here are certainly included on the list. But time moves on and for good reason. We're not who we were 10 or 20 years ago. That's as it's supposed to be and a "good thing". We're supposed to change. If we don't, why are we still living?

In the end, I certainly appreciate the people that I have around, even virtually, very much. The thing is, though, that circle can only be so wide before people start getting pushed out. I'm sure some were pushed out of mine just as I was pushed out of others. It's simply no big deal, though, and that was my problem with Facebook. Again, it wasn't Facebook's problem, but my problem. In the end, I learned something about myself and I hope that I can stay in touch with a small handful of the people that I (re) met.

The Money Pit - Bidding

About three weeks ago, we got our first and only bid on the house. Yes, it's been three weeks, we're still in the bidding process, and our lease expires at the end of January. Unfortunately, even under the best circumstances, we're probably going to lose about $40-$50K. We've been very reasonable with our bids as well as prompt. The buyers on the other hand see the current market as an excuse to not only come in low with bids but also treat us with some amount of disrespect. At one point, we waited almost six days for them to raise their offer by only two thousand dollars. When our agent asked the other what was taking so long, their agent responded sharply with how it's a buyers market and blah blah blah blah. OK, so the market stinks and everything. Can't your clients still treat us with some respect and dignity? We'll even settle for simple courtesy. How about getting back to us within two to three business days at the most? I understand that buyers are at a huge advantage right now. But, please, if you're going to rape me, at least treat me with some respect and give me a kiss on the cheek first.

Green Tunes: Episode 7

Every once in a while, a song pops up on the old iPod that I haven't heard in years. In this case, it was Helmet's He Feels Bad. This whole album was one of my favorites when it was released. The greatest thing about it to me is its length. Clocking in at just over thirty minutes are ten songs just spitting metal as hard as they can. No quiet songs, no repose, no weakness, just a half an hour of pure energy. This is an album cut off a CD released sixteen years ago by a band that seemingly came and went, even though they still released some truly great work after that, too.

so i take it out
every chance i get
left to be so mean
still it's sane and so sympathetic

want to feel bad
but you can't say no

it's no cause at all
it comes down to you and
who bleeds who?

just past the day
pleasant leaves you
comes to you the same way
passed on

every day's the last day
no one sees you
walk the part to stay
not you

judge yourself again
age is no excuse
had to find a way to
close my eyes, call it back and shoot.

Let the Right One In

To celebrate Amy's birthday and my survival of my first semester, we left Nicholas with a babysitter today. We went into Omaha to catch a movie and have some dinner. The movie we saw was quite good. It's a Swedish vampire film called Let The Right One In. The pacing was much slower than what you're about to see, almost too slow, but here's the action-packed trailer:



The film was actually more about young Oskar's coming of age than about all the action shots you just saw in the trailer. I can recommend this one if you like creepy movies but are not necessarily keen to a lot of violence or gore. Obviously, this movie has some violence, but very little gore as it's mostly about Oskar's relationships with the bullies, Eli the vampire, and himself.

One scene, however, made me laugh for almost a whole minute. Eli has accidentally created a new vampire when she fails to fully drain one of her victims. In this scene, the victim is visiting a friend and cat lover's apartment, but doesn't quite know what's happened to her yet. Hilarity ensues despite the fact that hilarity was not the intent.



I love how she takes a dive down the stairs while being engulfed by a cloud of cats. Anyway, despite the ridiculousness of this one scene, I really enjoyed the movie. It's worth checking out if you're a horror buff or if you want a fresh take on vampire lore.

Postulating Theorems, Formulating Equations

A comment left on the previous post has me thinking about learning. How do we learn best? The comment involved learning from television, specifically sitcoms and cartoons. Is that such a bad thing?

We know that there are a number of different learning styles as well as multiple intelligences. I would imagine that there are quite a few studies out there that describe how these theories interact; however, I am too lazy to find them so I will just have to stick with pondering out loud.

I stopped and thought about where I learned the story of the tigers and the strawberry. In that case, I learned about it from my mother who learned it while studying environmental science in college while I was in elementary school. She loved the story and repeated it often, taking the strawberry as a personal symbol of contentedness. In other words, I grew up with the story. It's hard to remember not knowing it.

But what about things that were not taught to me by parents or teachers? I have an armchair fascination with philosophy. Why? Monty Python's Flying Circus and The Philosophers Song. Here were five or six men standing around singing about philosophers drinking beer. I had no idea who any of the philosophers mentioned in the song were when I first heard it. But I started looking into them. I started reading some of those philosopher's writings. Did I understand most of it? Hardly. But I kept at it and after taking a couple of college courses and reading on my own, I know a little bit about a few of them, specifically Kant who wrote quite a bit about beauty and the nature of the sublime.



I am not a Renaissance man by any stretch of the imagination. I have no interest in learning so many bits of trivia that I can out-remember someone on a quiz show. To me, the process is far more interesting than the outcome. After all, if I start exploring a subject and find it boring, is there any reason to continue? If I start a project that requires learning new information but fail, was my attempt a failure or did I at least learn something from the experience that I can take along in the future?

I guess what I'm trying to say in this giant ramble is that learning from sitcoms and cartoons isn't necessarily a bad thing if we take some time to find how the things we learn are interconnected and then explore those connections. If we do that, we'll never stop learning. In the end, I believe that if we take that idea far enough, we'll somehow arrive at Kevin Bacon.

An Overdue Apology

I used to be one of the thickest people I know. As evidence, I offer a true tale that takes place many years ago in which I went on a date. But, see, the thing is I didn't know it was a date. Now I'm getting ahead of myself.

The phone rang and when I picked it up, a friend of mine asked if I wanted to go to the movies. I asked her who else was going. She hesitated and replied that nobody else was going. I thought that was strange but maybe we'd run into some other friends there.

We didn't. The movie was Sister Act 2, a movie so abysmal that we should have been making out during the opening credits. We didn't. We watched the whole thing, mostly in silence. After the credits rolled, we chatted as I drove her home. I pulled into her driveway, thanked her for the offer of going to the movies, and politely said good night. She returned the pleasantry and seemed irritated as she got out of the car and went inside.

As the screen door slammed, I realized three hours too late what had just happened. It's been about fifteen years since that night and I never apologized. So, for what it's worth, if you ever read this, I'm sorry for being so dense and snubbing you so harshly. I don't think I could ever convince you that it was completely unintentional. I was just a dullard.