The Meteoric Return

So, you're probably wondering where I've been recently. You're probably upset with worry, mashing your teeth with tears streaming down your cheeks. You've probably done everything short of calling the secret service to break down my door to find me.

The real reason that I've been gone is that I was involved with a fairly serious legal proceeding that prevented me from posting, in a round about way.

As of tomorrow, I should be free of such mind-numbing restrictions, and I'll start posting my backlog of posts the day after that, assuming that nothing goes wrong.

I am a lot better. My brace is off. I can walk and talk unaided. I've been back at work for some time. I am happy that I can try to put this horrid incident out of my mind.

Here's what I'm planning on doing. Instead of a massive explosion of posts all at once, I will post a backdated post once a day. Depending on where you read this blog, you should see this post remain on top until the backlog is cleared out, at which point I'll start posting regularly again. That will allow me to look over the posts and make sure that they're not completely insane ranting before I post them, and will give the impression that the blog is super active for the next two months.

I know that my readership is gone, gone, gone. Except for the person that checks in daily and refreshes the front screen a bajillion times (me), most people took the ten months that this blog has been derelict to flee to greener and more regularly updated pastures. So, to those of you who may be or are interested in my blog and I know that, I will be sending you emails with links to this post to let you know what is going on.

Great to be back.

Spherical Time (February 26, 2008)

P.S. Speaking of readership: This article by Michelle Sagara feels sort of on topic. Via Whatever, although I read her blog regularly too. I just checked his blog first this morning.

A Happy Valentine's Day

So, yesterday was a very long, very complicated day which demands a very long , very complicated post followed by a movie review. I think I'm going to divide it into blocks of time, just so that it's easier for me to manage my thoughts about it.

First, I woke up in Albuquerque at my brother's house at 6:30 a.m. and went to a mediation with my lawyers over the whole broken neck thing.

7:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Mediation: So, I learned something today that I didn't know. The woman that ran the red light and hit me (and broke my neck) is a former Buddhist nun. She's been having horrible problems since the accident because she was absolutely devastated by what she's done. She told me that she had nightmares and wasn't able to drive for about a year after the accident.

She asked to be able to speak with me alone, to apologize, and I agreed. She was crying, and told me how upset that she'd been about disrupting my life, and basically broke down. I couldn't think of anything to say at first, but I finally told her that she had to promise me that that she would work at forgiving herself. I said "everything is going to work out," but I'd slipped into lawyer mode and I just couldn't come up with something comforting that didn't sound like admitting fault.

I can't hate her anymore though. I just can't. She suffered too.

And then there was that conversation that we had, alone in that room. Heaven help me if I ever forget that conversation. It made everything that happened at IIDB feel like a win.

I brought four books. Over the seven hours that I was there I probably could have finished two of them, but I only finished off Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven. It's odd because that's a book that I really hadn't heard anyone talk about, but I think that it's definitely one of her best works. I did manage to start Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives though, so I got some good horrors of the deep laughs from that.

And then, around 2:15, we finally settled. Yes, I covered my medical bills, and I'm glad it's over. Finally, finally, finally. I'm still worried that I made the wrong decision, even though my lawyers and my mother agree that it was the right one.

I didn't think it would be over, but it is.

Let me just point out how wrenching negotiating for this money was. I'm not a good negotiator, but the guy on the other side was just jerking us around. He was good, but the mediator wasn't really conveying what my lawyers wanted to convey from him. My lawyer was giving her cues about how to say x-y-z, but she was just ignoring him. The opposing (i.e. insurance) lawyer was jerking us around, and it probably would have been better for us if we'd allowed our numbers to do the talking instead of the mediator.

I think that the reason that I'm mostly worried/convinced that I made the wrong decision is because I feel that my side didn't negotiate well. When you're on the side that has the edge, you need to push the other side out of their comfort zone. They had one up card and one reserve card, and they played really conservatively, inch by inch, in a style that allowed them to walk away without a clear victory, but without the huge losses that the opposing lawyer was there to prevent.

Perhaps if I'd sent the mediator along with one of my shoes and instructions to hit it on the desk we would have done better.

Hindsight, you know? It'll kill you every time, and it was potentially enough money to change my life. I still hope that it will, even though it's a lot less that I think we could have played for.

2:30-5:00 Hanging out with Jeff and his roommate recovering and trying not to cry: His roommate is really cute, and he's good at Halo & Call of Duty 4 as well. He was totally beating down on both of those games. Yeah, I'm not much of a first person shooter person, but those games on the XBox 360 look amazing. During this time I recovered from some of the shock that I felt about finally having settled my case.

5:30-7:30 Dinner with Pam and Jeff at Flying Star: Pam drove down all the way from Colorado to come to Jumper, which is based on a book that Steven Gould, one of our instructors at Viable Paradise, wrote. I've been promoting the movie to almost everyone I meet, and I've been looking forward to it for a weeks.

The even more cool thing is that Steven lives in Albuquerque, so he was going to the opening night showing of the movie as well with a huge group of friends and acquaintances. To be able to say that you went to the movie with the guy that wrote the book is a fairly respectable bragging point, and both Pam and I jumped at the chance to represent at the premiere.

I knew that he and a slew of others were going to go to Tuscanos, a Brazilian restaurant, after the movie, but because of the Mediation I hadn't eaten anything of substance all day so I already knew that I wanted to eat prior to the movie. Thus, I ended up with a very good Cobb salad. Hooray.

Pam has kept in much closer contact with the other VPXI alumni, so it was nice to hear what's been going on. I thought that I missed a bit because I was sick, but there seemed to be a lot more that I had either forgotten or missed out on, and I have to wonder about the way my head works some times. Pam is basically the preeminent Anne McCaffrey fan in existence, which is something that I did not have the faintest clue about from Viable Paradise. I mean, I suspect that it was mentioned, but I had no idea of the awesome depths to which her fandom goes. By comparison, my deep commitment to some of my favorite authors is purely dabbling.

If I ever have a fan like her, I will know that I've made it.

7:30-9:00 Jumper: I liked it. I really honestly did, and that's not because I'm going to send Steve a link to the review blog when I post it.

9:00-11ish Dinner at Tuscanos: So, just before the movie started, I saw a gentleman with salt and pepper hair sitting down with his wife. I'm not very good with names and faces, and I'd already been confused once, so I decided that I very much needed to make sure that it was in fact S.M. Stirling that was sitting there in the theater. I went down to talk with Laura, sidled up to her, and in a near whisper I asked her if that was S.M. Stirling, and laughingly said "I've confused him with George R. R. Martin before."

She looked at me and said, "You don't know George?" Then she looked up about four rows from where we were standing and says "Hey George! This is Ben, he'll meet you later!"

I'm not religious, but the best description that my generation uses to describe how I felt at that moment was: O.M.G. In all of the mindless valley girl splendor that phrase implies.

Absolutely extreme fandom alert. My copy of A Game of Thrones was left in Iraq with the marines by my little brother and I haven't yet replaced it, preventing me from rereading the series recently, but it's still the fantasy series at the moment.

After the show, I was trying to figure out the logistics of the situation. Jeff, Nick, and er . . . Nick's girlfriend (darn it, I'm doing really badly with names today) had driven up with me, but I had decided that I was now massively interested in staying for dinner. They volunteered to go back to school by bus, thus allowing me to indulge in a little bit of serial fan worship of a few of my favorite authors. Thank you all so much. I freaking owe you.

Pam and I wandered into Tuscanos. Since both of us had anticipated eating early, neither of us had really anticipated eating after the movie as well, and we weren't part of the 60 person reservation that Steven made at the restaurant. We mutually decided that we should hang around and see if there were any seats left before diving in.

At around this time I was standing near a table where it looked like Laura and Steve might sit, and a woman is looking up at us. She stands up from her seat and starts making conversation with us. I don't remember what the conversation started out as, but my first thought was that she was probably Laura's mother.

Then she introduced herself as Joan . . . Saberhagen.

No offense to Mr. Martin or Mr. Stirling, but of the local New Mexico authors, Fred Saberhagen is probably my favorite. I've got an entire little section of my shelf that contains all eightvolumes of The Lost Swords, The Complete Book of Swords, An Armory of Swords (merely edited by him), Merlin's Bones, and the "Saberhagen: My Best" collection of short stories. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of what he's written. He is awesome.

My eyes just absolutely lit up for a moment, and I pumped Joan Saberhagen's hand, and I gushed for just long enough that it suddenly hit me that he'd recently died.

Darn it.

Darn it, darn it, darn it.

I offered my condolences, but it must be hard to be put in a position where your connection to someone is your recently deceased husband. I can't even imagine. She looked sad for a moment, but she must have the will of a saint because it was only in her face for the briefest second.

I think it was Joan and Steve himself that suggested to us that it was eventually time to get seats, and that we should go for the seats that we wanted, and I did. The table next to George R. R. Martin was partially empty, and so I drew on my reserve of "You already regret one thing that you've done today, just suck it up and remember that if you don't do this you'll regret it tomorrow" motivation and asked George if we could pull the tables together.

Thus, it came to be that I sat across the table from George R. R. Martin for dinner at Tuscanos. I should have offered to pay, and if I wasn't worried that my debit card would be declined if I tried, I would have.

Next to George sat Pam, and between us was a hilarious friend of Steve's named Gary. On my other side was Parris, a gentleman whose name I immediately lost, and a gentleman whose name I think was Hank.

I, of course, made a complete fool of myself, which I do not for a moment regret. It was blissfully, painfully, embarrassingly funny, and I got to tell my "Are you George R. R. Martin?" "No, he's S. M. Stirling" story to George himself. Yes, I may not have made another meaningful comment for the rest of the night, but that little itsy-bitsy anecdote was worth it.

You have to take pleasure in the small things.

It's odd, I tried to listen to the conversation shooting around across the table for the rest of the evening, but the one thing that really caught my attention was when George said that he had always loved the insanely complicated rescue plans, and that one day he'd have to set up a huge one where one person dresses as the king, another as a knight, and then they swing into the feast on a rope.

This being George R. R. Martin though, he pointed out that everything would have to go wrong. I pseudo-countered, pointing out that if he was the writer, the author would expect everything to go pear shaped. It seems so obvious now, and I wish I'd come up with the obvious conclusion to that line of reasoning: If it was in one of his books, in order to subvert the reader expectations the intricate, complex, and convoluted rescue plan would have to succeed from top to bottom, and then go completely wrong once they thought they were safe.

The guy sitting between Pam and me, Gary, is unbelievably funny though. He was the most interesting dinner companion. He works with GPS systems, although I swear that we made it through dinner without touching on that subject once. It wasn't until later that I found that out.

A note about Tuscano's itself: They have cute waiters. Really cute waiters. With those pale blue eyes and short hair, and everything. Oh, and I find their premise interesting. They've got a salad bar (and it was a good one), but then the waiters traipse around the restaurant carrying kebabs of meat. Bacon wrapped veal, tri-tip steak with various glazes, roasted chicken, spicy sausages, and everything else. If you want some, you get a bit. It wasn't phenomenal, but it was still on the good side. Pam's chocolate hockey puck thing was excellent, for example, and I couldn't get enough of their spicy sausage.

At some point around 11 p.m. I realized that I'd missed a call from my mother. She told me that due to weather I was to "Stay with my brother" and two sentences later "drive right home so that you don't get caught in the storm." As of the time of this writing, a day later, there still ain't no storm, and I don't think she ever managed to fully clarify which of those two orders she actually wanted me to follow.

11ish to 12:30 Champagne at Steve and Laura's: Now, you have to understand that I'm not much of a champagne person. It think it tastes bad, but I think that about nearly everything with alcohol in it, and it apparently was a really expensive bottle of champagne, so I had half a glass, and it was the best that I've ever had, which means that I got it down and I managed to make it stay down.

Upon arrival at Steve and Laura's (and I used to live in the same part of town, actually), I realized that they have more books than I do. Way more books. Way, way more books. I mean, wowsers. I wish I had shelves like that.

We sat around, talked for a while. I told my story about the neck, and for the first time it was a story that is in the past tense. It is something that happened to me and is not still happening to me. It was a really happy evening for me.

I got to see the office, which I now know is famous. I don't get it, I thought I knew the author's online domains, but I was quite wrong about this one. Steve has a blog, and it will be going up on the side bar when I get a chance to move things around. (Note: Ta-dah!)

I did get some pictures though, by the machinations and manipulations of those around me. Two of me, one with George and one with Pam and Steve, are visible at Pam's blog here. There's also one involving the chocolate hockey puck taken of Pam by me.

12:30-2:00 a.m. Driving home: Yes, I finally did drive home, stopping to get gas and use the restroom. It wasn't the drowsiest that I've ever been on the way home, but it isn't an experiment that I'd likely repeat soon.

I just remembered something that I'd forgotten, so I'll mention it here: I was carrying around my (second) copy of Jumper, and got Steve to autograph it. He wrote something really awesome in it: "To [ST], who will write others as good." Awwwwww . . .

And that was my Valentine's day.

What's Happening

Yeah, I know I haven't updated recently, but then again, I know that those of you that read this aren't going to see it soon anyway.

What's been happening? In no particular order:

Well, I'm doing better. I'm mostly off of the neck brace now, but I'm still in physical therapy twice a week.

I'm worried about Viable Paradise. I don't really have the money to go, so it's going to be interesting paying off the debt that I'm going to have since I don't make enough money to cover my bills anyway.

The summer's beautiful. We've been getting some rain and some thunder storms, which are beautiful and stunning and everything that summer in NM typically is. Now that I'm thinking of leaving for good, I'm apparently going to miss this place something fierce.

The dogs are both getting very old. I'm worried about them. My dad's not doing too well either, and I'm worried about him too.

I have a crush on another cute internet boy. This one is straight, which fits right into my comfort zone. His name is Jamie Stroud, and he's a gymnast/martial artist from Cali. He's also a member of the Unification Church. Considering my interest in comparative religion, I find that awesomely cool, and I want to go ask him all sorts of questions about it.

Also, he's hotter than hell. *Cough* (<---Link removed due to brokenness, Feb 08)

I'm going to see Elliot in September when I go to Viable Paradise, which is going to be awesome. I'm going to finally bring him my "real" wedding present, which differs from the "from the heart" present that he already has.

Ah, right, I had a sort of mental breakdown about two weeks ago. I'm on prozac again, and I'm wondering about my mental health. I wish I didn't have problems. I wish I could be not-depressed like other people, so that I wouldn't have to be depressed about being depressed. Ah, the vicious circle.

There have been some interesting happenings on CF and IIDB. No promotion for me yet on IIDB, but they've allowed some non-Christian mods on CF for the first time. Raven got one of the positions and I'm rooting for her. Go Raven!

Oh, duh. I got the last Harry Potter book, and I saw the most recent movie. The movie was very good, the book was just good. Don't get me wrong, I liked the book, and I thought the ending was appropriate and in line with the entire theme of the series. However, the editing was poor. There were several internal contradictions that a careful editor should have fixed revisions ago.

(At this point, I'll warn you that there are spoilers in the next paragraph for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, although hopefully by the time its published you'll have read the book for yourself.)

Also, there's some interesting speculation on the religious nature of this last book. Yeah, there's the Calvary walk, the death, the resurrection, and even the crucifixion, but I still see lots of non-religious themes in the book. Some of the ones that strike me at this particular moment are Harry's reliance on his friends, the utter lack of betrayal that he suffered by someone close to him, and the fact that he lives through his "death" and goes on to live happily for a long time afterward.

Now that Rowling's done with the series, I hope she does the smart thing and allows others to expand on her intellectual property. Not me, per se, but I'm sure there are writers out there that will give their left nut to contribute to a series that will automatically guarantee that their works sells millions of copies.

All she'd have to do would be approve the plots, and let a new batch of writers take over. Even splitting the profits with the new writers, Rowling's sitting on a gold mine. Look at what Tolkien's son is doing with his father's old intellectual property (And Frank Herbert's son as well).

Some writers jealously guard their intellectual property, but sometimes they fail to recognize that sometimes letting it expand under their supervision but not their direct control can be just as effective.

Finally, there are frogs or toads croaking in the riverbed, which is not a usual sound for NM.

I think that's about it for now.

Places

So, I had my doctor's appointment today. Things are looking good, so they've moved me off of the Miami-J neck brace and have put me in a soft collar. That means that after six months I am now officially allowed to turn my head from side to side.

At the doctor's office, I took off my brace as soon as the doctor was out of the room. I sat for a moment, and then I put the brace back on.

My mother was sitting there, looking at me, and she asked "Why did you put the brace back on?"

"I just feel really strange without it on."

And it does feel really strange. I'm still terrified of looking around, and I notice that I still refuse to try to look down at my feet when I'm walking or stepping over something. It's going to be an adjustment.

This also means that I can drive again, and that raises a whole host of other questions in my mind. I freak out at the smallest thing when I'm driving with my mom or dad, so what am I going to be like on the road? I figure that I'll slowly try to get back into it over the next week or so.

Also, I just received an email from my brother, and like usual, it was unbelievably hilarious. I wish he would post them online or allow me to post them. I'll bug him about that.

At the moment though, I should just mention that they're dealing with the infestation of penguins one step at a time, and that he's not happy that the lifeguard (an independent contractor) makes nearly three times what he makes.

You don't normally think of "lifeguard" as one of those jobs involved with risking your life in Iraq.

Besides, I want to be a lifeguard at a pool in Iraq. All those hot, horny marines in their swim trunks. Jesus, I'd take a third of what the current lifeguard makes.

Finally, I just want to say: I am an American.

What I mean by that is, I read my news through Fark and that means that I read articles from all over the world. As an American, I have the geographical knowledge of a primary school Briton or less.

So, if you publish a newspaper online: Please, please, please put your location somewhere on every page. And by location I mean city, state or province, and country. If you keep saying "Clark County officials" or "Dummas Township Sheriff" I don't have the faintest clue of where the events located in the article happened.

For example, there are at least eight Clark Counties (a google search reveals AR, IL, IN, KS, OH, NV, WA, and WI on the first two pages of results). There are also a few Springfields, Portlands, and Washingtons. If you really want to be boggled, see here and here. People don't seem to be very creative with place names.

So help us out. City, state, and country. That's all I'm asking for.

Commentary Media

So, this is the 100th post in my blog. I wish I could think of something special to say, but I can’t. I’ll try to think of something impressive before I reach 500.

I did get good news yesterday when I visited my lawyer. I’m not allowed to talk about it, but I’m not as worried as I was last week, which is nice.

Also, I’m sitting here watching CNN, and I’ve been shocked by what they’ve been talking about:

• President Bush’s press conference in Brazil
• A shooting in Florida, complete with details about the suspect and what went on.
• An Interview with Louis Farrakhan even though he hasn’t recently published a book

That’s right, they’re talking about real news. How crazy is that?

Does anyone else think that it’s wrong that I’m so surprised to be getting news from CNN?

Actually, I haven’t watched CNN in a while. I switched almost exclusively to MSNBC a few months back because I’ve been really impressed with Keith Olbermann.

My mother took me to see “Goodnight, and Good Luck,” but I didn’t get much out of it at the time because I was more impressed with the Liberace interview than the dark look at the times.

Now that I’ve had some time to reflect, I think that the biggest difference between now and then is the depth of the coverage. I know that analysis is not itself very deep, and not only that but it’s been said before. Still, it’s becoming so endemic among the news organizations that really it’s the only thing that can be said.

Back when I was at UNM, the College Republicans released a study that found that most college professors were liberal, and they suggested that there should be some sort of way to balance political ideologies. Some positive movement to increase the number of conservative as it were. Not an affirmative action, of course, because that would be wrong. However, they did suggest that perhaps there was some subtle discrimination going on that should be corrected by the University to promote treating groups fairly.

They called a press conference and at least one of the local news stations showed up with a camera crew. The College Republicans had press packets for them, and when they took questions, they did not take questions from any of the students present (both the College Democrats and the UNMGSA showed up, mostly because I overheard the preparations for the press conference and let them know right away).

That night, on the news, they reported exactly what the College Republicans said. There was no response, no qualification. Later, when we finally got our hands on the press kit, it wasn’t that hard to figure out that the study wasn’t scientific.

Granted, we had somewhat personal reasons to question the “study,” but the press should be the press. It wouldn’t have been that difficult critique the report a little before giving it air time.

There’s something to be said for an objective press, but there’s a certain point at which all of these shows have completely divested any and all connections with humanity.

There’s a quality that Keith Olbermann, the Daily Show, and Rush Limbaugh all share, which is that they all retain a human perspective. Olbermann may report on the same things that the CNN anchors, but he can laugh when man marries a llama or be angry when Bush revokes Habeas Corpus. While I don’t agree with him, Rush does the same thing with a different perspective, and he makes a good living doing it. So does Jon Stewart, although he tries to focus on the laughter.

That human perspective is responsible for a surprising amount of depth. Whenever Jon Stewart takes something that Bush said a year ago and plays it next to something he said yesterday and the two statements completely contradict each other, that is something that the mainstream news media should be reporting on as well. Giving us a context and historical framework isn’t just a fun way to lead into entertainment news, it’s part of their job.

I suppose this applies just as much to art as it does to news: without perspective you can’t possibly have depth. Otherwise everything is just a flat surface.

Speaking of surfaces, and this is the only problem that I have with Olbermann, interviews with talking heads don’t give depth to a story. Interviews are only news if the person being interviewed can offer a perspective that the announcer can’t (i.e. a professional opinion on medicine or law) or is part of the news story. A victim whose house has been swept away is a legitimate interview. An author with a new book out really isn’t, especially if he’s neither a professional nor part of the story.

Perspective doesn’t require partisanship. Stewart makes fun of liberals, and so does Colbert. True, not as often as conservatives, but remember that for most of his run Republicans were in control of most of the government. Making fun of the weak isn’t usually that funny.

I don’t offer many solutions. I have enough problems of my own. However, in this situation there are some clear and simple things that need to be done to improve things:

1. No more constant coverage. I understand if you leap to cover breaking news. However, constant 24 hour coverage of something that isn’t a terrorist attack makes me ignore you. Anna Nichole is dead. It took her three weeks to be buried. All of the coverage that I needed could be summed up in ten minutes after the fact, and in the mean time I wasn’t watching cable news.
2. Interviews with authors should be handled like the Daily Show handles them. You acknowledge they’re on a book tour and you give them six to ten minutes to hawk their book. Pretending that they have expert opinions that matter is pathetic.
3. Give us context for every story. There are no new stories, and you are the people that wrote all the history books. Look back through your records and make sure that you cover both what the person is saying now at what they said yesterday. Everyone will be so impressed that you’ll have massive readership/viewership.
4. Questions are good. Do you remember why Woodward and Bernstein are famous? Hard questions make good reporters, which make good news.
5. Don’t pretend that you aren’t human. I’m a human, and I like to get my news from other humans. That’s why people liked the Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokow and Dan Rather, and why we’re starting to stop paying attention to cable news. If I wanted to deal with plastic anchors, I’d buy myself a News Anchor Barbie.

I understand that you want ratings (and through ratings, money), but there are a lot of people out there that aren’t being served by what’s on cable news. Sci-Fi, Lifetime, and Bravo have all proven that you can make niche television successful. I’m sure that if you offer enough kids with communications degrees internships you can make a news channel that offers good news and is financially solvent.

Maybe the next time I watch CNN, I won’t be shocked if there’s some semblance of real news on it.

Incidentally, I never found my compass. So when I was out we stopped by Artisan/Santa Fe to buy another one. They had about ten types of bow compasses, but they even looked through the special order catalogues and can’t find one that was like the one that I lost.

The manager of the Santa Fe Store (who’s a great guy) told me that there isn’t as much call for drafting tools because of all the computer design programs and that they might not make them anymore.

What is that about? They don’t make the pens that I use anymore either. I’m beginning to feel paranoid. What item do I use are they going to discontinue next? Rulers? Paper?

Stillness

A couple of weeks ago, I was walking with my father Monday. We do that every Monday. Since I broke my neck, that is the time upon which we agreed that he should come to visit.

Often we talk about what I've picked up from the internet during the last week, or what I've read about, or what I'm thinking about. He'll tell me about what's going on with him.

That usually doesn't take that long. Nothing really changes in the state of either of our lives at the moment. We just sit and exist for most of the week.

It was cold, but not really that cold because the sun was out and the wind wasn't blowing. Today I was walking by myself, and even though it wasn't probably that much colder, it felt like it due to the wind.

I remember the ground was soaked from all the snow that was still melting. The roads were huge tracts of mud carving canyons for the wheels of cars. It had been about a week since the last weekend of hard snow, and so the snow the and mud traded off patches in the fields.

We were trying to keep to the snow because the mud would cling and the snow wouldn't, so that meant walking through the fields and not along the road.

On out way back toward the house, we cut through a field, but had to cross a neighbors long driveway. Since the driveway didn't have as much traffic as the road, there was still snow and ice on it.

There was a lull in the conversation, and I heard something. I put out my arm, and stopped my father, and he felt silence.

The driveway was slightly tilted down toward the road, and as the snow and the ice melted it would pop softly, and then trickle together, until it formed barely audible rivulets.

You wouldn't think that standing still, looking down at the snow and mud would be pretty, but it really was. We stood there for a few moments, looking down at the driveway and listening to the water thaw and then run along the driveway.

Dad came over this week and just wanted to mention that was one of the most beautiful moments of his life.

Yeah, it was for me too.

*********

I finished all of the Anita Blake books that I bought at the book fair. Nine in total. That's nine books in six days. In my defense, I didn't spend all of my time reading. Still, I'm sort of ticked. You'd think that someone that reads as quickly as I do would be able to do better. Still, on Monday I did do three books, which makes me feel better.

Also, I had a checkup today with my doctor. Six weeks left . . . I hope. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, anyway.

It feels like I've been sitting here forever.

Memories, Sweet Memories

I just put up the first two Lex and Lia posts that I wrote this morning. I was looking for the original posts that belonged to a separate, ancient blog, but I couldn't find them, so this is based on what I remember.

I'm sure Ashley remembers the Madrid scene, although I know this one is different. I remember the first one that I wrote being better, but obviously I can't remember it well enough to duplicate it. I do know that Alex wandered around longer, but I don't remember why that was.

Just in case anyone is wondering, Madrid really does have a Saloon, a Soda fountain, and a boxcar shop. Only the motel is fictional. It's an unusual place, and since I've been there it seems like the perfect place for vampires and other creatures of the night to visit during the middle of the night.

Also, as a reminder to myself, the date in the story December 21. The vamps are celebrating the Winter Solstice. That means Christmas is just around the corner for Lex and Lia. I'll have to remember that for next week.

What else is going on in my non-life. . . ?

Well, I finished the first Anita Blake book yesterday, and I finished the second one this morning. It's true, they're like fantasy mystery novels, and they're darned easy reading. I'm glad I picked up the whole set at that book fair. The whole "Voting rights for Vampires" thing is an interesting twist on the whole world of the undead. It's something that I wasn't expecting, and so it's a nice touch.

I also found a letter from a friend buried in an old email account yesterday. It's odd, I don't check my email like an addict, although I have an addictive personality. I tend to let my addresses multiply and then slowly wither and die under an inconceivable amount of spam. I love the gmail filter, which has so far proven 99% efficient.

The old letter was in my school account, which I access with Thunderbird from Mozilla. You'd think that it would be a decent program for email considering how good Firefox is, but at times it hangs and leaves my entire computer waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting. . . . Also, it doesn't have preset guidelines for spam, so everything gets through, which is sickening. Shouldn't it at least have some basic guidelines before "learning" from me? I don't have time to go through the 700+ emails in there now to train it.

Of course, there's my Yahoo account, which has 500+, but that's just because I have a few daily subscriptions. Still, I dread having to slog through that to find the things that I need.

Right, anyway, that old letter was from that friend that I was worried about because he's down South and I haven't heard from him. So, I at least know that as of a month ago he was okay and alive, which is great news.

My sabbatical is going okay as well. I'm obviously not yet doing the work on my novel that absolutely must get done, but I've been thinking about it, and I've been writing every day, which is a good sign. The reason that I'm avoiding it is because I have to do more rewriting, which is something that I hate. Yuck. This is the 5th draft on some of these chapters, and that is annoying as all get out. I'm just glad that I don't have to redo the whole book start to finish.

I also need to spend more time on art. I'm getting near completion of my first color work, and it's going to be a bitch to frame because it's such an odd size. Still, I think it looks just the way I wanted it to look. I'll post one of those blurry pictures of it from a distance when I'm done.

I want to do some more complex stuff after this, but it's going to hurt because complex means a whole lot of time. Also, my neck is only so-so. I think all of the reading that I've been doing has been hurting it, so I can't spend a lot of time trying to bend over a piece of paper.

Oh right, final thing. While I was looking through Tad William's previous interviews I found the blog "Pat's Fantasy Hotlist." If you're a fantasy buff like I am, this looks like a phenomenal blog. It's got interviews, releases, and it's also got contests where they send you books.

Yeah, it's like a fantasy or something.

Anyway, I added it to the Worlds & Time sidebar, along with the blog of a writer who I've never before heard of before, Hal Duncan, but who wrote this amazingly cool blog entry. I love the anger, the power, and the absolute righteousness of it. So he gets an automatic spot on the list. And I'm going to buy one of his books, when I get around to it.

Now, I think I should do some work. So once again, until next time, space cowboys.

Update: Yarg, the Myspace blog isn't working. I'll have to post this over there later. See, this is why I keep the blog in two places.

Hygeine & Worry

If you're a family member you shouldn't read this if you want to hold onto your sanity.

Crap, I'm falling apart. Between the emergency dental appointment, the latest round of teeth problems, and my neck hurting I want to ask for more pain meds.

If I'd actually waited until March for my dentist's first open Thursday appointment, I think I would have died. I mean, my teeth hurt if I just blow air on them. That sucks.

I think I know why my neck hurts. I've put on some weight recently, so I feel pretty horrible about myself. It's not like I should be up and around, so most exercising is forbidden to me. With my neck hurting again, I shouldn't even be walking too much again.

I'm not supposed to look up and down, but when I woke up today I knew I had to feel better so I decided that I needed to feel good about myself. I took a long shower, shaved, and then gave myself a trim, down there.

I'm typically pretty hairy. I'm not a bear by any stretch of the imagination and the hair on my chest is sparse. But I've always been a bush down there. I've shaved a couple of times, enough to learn some of the tricks (siscors down to a certain level, trimmers for a couple of places but not the underside, and an actual razor for the underside).

I have to admit, I don't always take as good care of the hair as I should. I suppose if I actually dated I would think about it more often, but these days it's just usually just for me.

Here's a funny thing, I used to think that hair was pretty universal. You know the covers of Men's Health & Fitness? I always thought they were shaved. And Porn Stars too. And I'm sure a lot of them do. \_/ is not a natural formation, as far as I know. The idea that some guys were just mostly naturally hairless hadn't occured to me.

I remember when I saw J. with his shirt off for the first time, and with less than that later, and I realized that he was just naturally hairless. He certainly wasn't the kind of guy that would take the time to shave his chest (and everything else) and I even asked him about it. Genetics can be a miserable thing if you get the hairy end of the stick.

So I trimmed today. I didn't take too much time, and I didn't do a great job, but it makes me feel better. And I hurt my neck from all that craning and looking down. Between the shower, the shave, the trim, and the Murano underwear I feel pretty good.

I did get a cool new toy. An external hard drive that's about 6 times larger than my laptop. I got it because . . . uh . . . I've been doing a lot of writing recently. Yeah, that's the ticket. Anyway, it's a beautiful thing. I can't remember if I mentioned this, but about a week ago I tried to back up my writing to my flash drive and accidentally backed up from my flash drive to my hard drive, erasing all of the work that I've done for the last three months.

I haven't done a lot of work in the last three months, thankfully, but I did loose a couple of things. Twenty pages on one of my book specs. About five pages over various chapters. A huge trunk of the file where I keep some of the dreams that I can remember when I wake up. I had some great ones back when I was still on Oxycodone, but obviously those are all gone.

So, I'm keeping multiple copies of everything now.

What else is gong on . . . . Hmmm.

I'm worried about Mike and Alex. I haven't heard from Mike in a couple of months now. I know I missed him right as he was going to South America or Central America or somewhere but I since I don't know when he's coming back I get to be worried until I hear from him.

The last time I saw him, he still wasn't doing great. Crap, I hope he's okay.

You know, it's odd about Alex. I've met him a grand total of once, but he's a great guy. If you know Alex, and I know at least two of the people that read this blog do (one of them is Alex), you must know what an amazing individual he is. I mean, read his blogs some time. He's definitely a thinker, and we need more of him. Good thing he's a breeder, eh?

Still, he's been having some crises of late. I think it's okay if I mention them because he mentions them. He's going Jew (or back to Jew, I guess). That doesn't bother me, as long as he doesn't become Hassidic and start telling me that we can't talk. After all, between Elliot and Jeff and A. and J. and etc., etc., etc. I seem to spend an awful lot of time with them. The Jews tend to be a great people to hang out with, and nearly all the ones that I know can hold down their end of a deep conversation.

He's going to Israel though, and will probably join the army there. He was being recruited by the Navy Intelligence, so he'll probably do really well over there.

That scares me. There are a couple of reasons that I can think of (that I'm willing to admit to). The first is that I'd worry about him. I'm not neutral on Middle East Issues after living with Elliot, but I can't deny that it's dangerous.

The other big one is that sometimes I think that the military is what finally tore me and Matt apart. We never really got along when we were kids. He was outgoing, funny, and straight, and I was the opposite. I say that we made each other's lives hell, but mostly because I was so jealous of him.

And then he went to the military. There aren't many places that he can go where I can't follow, but that's one of them. Which sucks because I seriously considered the military. It was supposed to be my irrational outlet. My way to finally find some drive. It was a surprise to me when I found out that he joined the Marines, but there was also some jealousy because I thought it was my plan.

In the end, it finally was just impossible because I'm gay. I can't lie about it, and I would rather have not been thrown out.

Now I don't even know him. He came home from basic, and it hit me that even though we grew up in the same house, we don't even share the same history. I remember he finally told me that our phone number was (505) ***-DUDE. In all the years that our phone number has been the same, I'd never known that. All his friends knew, and somehow I didn't. It's just a phone number, but to me it illustrates how totally disconnected I am from him.

So I think that I worry that when Alex goes away, I won't be able to connect with him any more. That he'll be as distant as Matt is.

I know how crazy that sounds. I mean, I don't even know him, but since I've been confined to my little room here, he's one of the few people that I seem connected to. I suppose I'm latching on because I don't have anyone else, and that doesn't bother me as much as I hope it bothers him.

Finally, I guess I'm worried that I'll never play D&D again. Why I connect Alex with D&D and not Jeff and Mike is inexplicable. If I had to guess it's because Alex was there at the game right as everything started to fall apart. R. moved away (I didn't know you for very long either but I still love you, R.). The main group had already fractured apart. Then I lost my job, and had to move home.

So Alex is a symbol of my problems with D&D. How that relates to him moving away I'm not quite sure, but somewhere in my twisted psyche it does. Crap. I need to move to New York. Somewhere in a city of 8 million people there must be enough people that play D&D for me to find some players. I bet even Miami Beach has people that play D&D, somewhere among the models and plastic surgeons.

It's too much to think about at the moment. I don't want to be worried. Aparently my last post spilled over into a rant in front of my Mom, so she went out and rented me so "gay movies" like The Kathy & Mo Show and Another Gay Movie, and I'm going to go watch them now.

And, just in case someone from New York is reading, I haven't figured out what I'm doing with this wedding present yet. I'll figure it out soon.

Statistically

Backdated a day to reflect when I started it.

I got a CAT scan last Thursday, and I had a visit with my orthopedic surgeon today. There’s good news and bad news.

First, the good news: I probably won’t need surgery at all. I should recover to the point where I’m statistically as good as new.

Now, if you’re wondering about that statistically, let me move on to the bad news: It will probably be another three months in the neck brace during which I get to sit around and be bored out of my mind.

What’s happening is that my neck broke in two places, and while my left side is healing just fine, my right side isn’t knitting together the way that it’s supposed to. It might not mend at all.

As long as the one side heals, it should function normally, even though it won’t be quite normal. So, while it’s statistically possible that this will somehow weaken the structure of my neck, chances are that it won’t ever actually have any deleterious effect on me.

So, statistically I’ll be as good as new.

In three more months.

Yarg. Three more months of this.

Another bit on statistics.

I had a problem with lesbian professors in college. There was some fundamental disconnect in my mind between what I perceived in reality and what I was reading in the feminist textbooks we were reading and discussing in class. Everything I said was an attack on them (i.e. lesbian college professors), and after a while I got tired of it.

Then there was this not-a-lesbian who was also a bit of a rides-a-motorcycle, wore-leather-jacket-to-class, very-butch, brought-in-her-dog-occasionally and I-was-talking-with-another-professor-who-thought-she-was-lesbian-and-told me-that-she-was-one who kicked me out of her class, but that’s an entirely different story.

Back on topic, I was sitting around before class with one of my lesbian professors and we were talking. Somehow I suggested that I wanted to teach a class. The woman next to me asked what I would teach, and I outlined a class about exploring the way that humans form and keep stereotypes.

Have you ever watched the television show House, and he looks around and figures out exactly what is going on with everyone around him? He does that using a set of carefully crafted stereotypes.

I had this idea for the first day of class, where students would come in. I’d call a couple of people up to the front of the room, and I’d ask the class to answer a series of questions about what our stereotypes informed us about them based on their appearance.

While I was talking about this, the lesbian professor was looking at me. I don’t remember what she said exactly, but I still remember the look. Basically the upshot was that it was a stupid idea for a class, that she didn’t think I was capable of being an instructor, and that stereotypes were bad because of racism/sexism/homophobia.

Obviously I’d need to do more reading on the subject, but considering the slapstick nature of the class (Queer Flims . . . which turned into Lesbian Films starring relatively attractive women plus a couple of old Jack Lemmon movies), I was really surprised by the vehemence of the negative reaction. If you teach fluff, perhaps you shouldn’t be so critical of other people’s class ideas.

I acknowledge that I couldn’t do it off the top of my head. I’d definitely do some reading before hand, but the general shape of the class is fairly clear to me.

You start out with an examination of what stereotypes are, and how they relate to topics such as racism, sexism, and prejudice. Talk about how we automatically create a personal “us-centrism” that informs how we react to interpersonal stimuli.

You examine negative stereotypes more in depth, and then the stereotype that stereotypes are negative. Take a couple of classes to talk about various groups in depth.

After that, I’d want to talk about how stereotypes can be useful, and harmless. I’d start with a day or so examining the way we subconsciously form stereotypes all the time, from infancy onward. I’d move onto branding.

Branding is actually a fairly deep subject by itself. I could make a week or even two weeks out of marketing products, politics, and ideas. It’s amazing how we ignore the fact that there is a multibillion dollar industry of creating stereotypes and selling them to people.

My worst topic (and therefore what I would end with), would be the actual statistics of stereotyping. Generalizing without understanding the probabilities of your assumptions is stupid. It’s what makes House such as amazing character. He examines all situations in terms of causality and understands the statistical basis for what he does.

That’s my other story about statistics.

Weddings

As I start this, I’m several thousand feet above West Texas, on my way back from New York. I had a blissful time at the wedding, but it convinced me that some part of me must be a Jewish girl.

On Saturday, I spend some time with M. and her friends S. and A. in their apartment in a very, very Jewish section of the city. We basically just sat around and traded stories while M. tried on a few of the dresses that she’d picked up for the wedding and did a fashion show for us.

Actually, I thought she looked good in all of them, and I didn’t hesitate to tell her so, even though I had no idea how really attractive M. was until I saw her with her hair done for the wedding. Then, at the wedding proper, I spent most of my time with M. and Amy. As a fegala goyim, I felt like I had about as much place as M. and Amy in the men’s room, but it doesn’t change the fact that I seem to get along great with the tribal girls.

Like I said: some part of me is a Jewish girl.

This was my first orthodox wedding, but I haven’t been to many weddings so I don’t exactly know how much comparison I can bring to it. I went to one in Oregon when I stayed with my Grandmother on my father’s side. A cousin’s wedding in upstate NY, and another in central California. Oh, and Mike’s wedding in Albuquerque. So maybe five total, although I’ll parlay knowledge of various customs into knowledgeable sounding pronouncements whenever I have something to say.

The entire thing was very interesting, from the limo ride to the wedding in the morning, to the signing of the tsuba in the men’s room, and relative silence of the actual ceremony. Maybe I’m sensitive, but the lack of preaching was odd to me. Both of the religious Christian weddings used their time to evangelize to the gathered disciples. If it happened at this wedding, it must have been directly to the bride and groom when the microphones were turned off. I may not have felt out of place in the men’s room, and I certainly didn’t know the tunes or where I was supposed to go, but the ceremony itself didn’t make me feel bad to be a non-Jew. I spent more time thinking about Elliot and A.’s wedding than thinking through the theological justifications of twisting Pauline Christianity to fit a wedding, and that’s a good thing.

So, wow. I’d never been to a 500+ person wedding before. I’ve been to a big wedding before, but this was like being involved in something presidential. Some of the other groomsmen and I couldn’t help but to speculate what it cost to put it on, but I have no point of reference.

Oh, right, that’s another thing, I got to see Mark, Benjy and Julian again. I still don’t know if Julian was mad about the whole “You’re not my friend thing” from Miami (and if he is, I’m so sorry about it that I still remember it), but I was happy to see Mark and Benjy again, and meet the rest of Elliot’s inner circle. I had heard stories about them for years, and even now when I talk to Elliot, it helps me understand who he is to meet them. That and Bender is really cute, followed closely by Uri. Sorry Mark, I gotta love you, but you’re just not my type.

(Not that I would ever do anything along those lines. It would be like fooling around with an extended family member that I only see every couple of years.)

Incidentally, there do seem to be a lot of Jewish guys that are my type, without actually being, you know, “my type.” I’m sure one of the cute, successful Jewish boys at the wedding was (cough) my type of guy. Then again, there were some cute waiters too. Maybe that’s the whole “I’m not getting any” itch talking and not any kind of gaydar. Actually, Elliot’s always been more perceptive on that than I am, which drives me nuts. He doesn’t even need it.

On a slightly less shallow and creepy note, I don’t think that my toast sucked. I skipped this entire beginning section about how my Hebrew wasn’t that good (wink, wink) so please bear with me, but I also don’t think my weak kneed performance sounded careless either. And, no, I was never planning to actually tell any Miami stories. What could I say in front of all those distinguished guests (and Elliot’s rabbi)? That I was more worried about people thinking that you were gay than you were so I used to make sure to say we weren’t a couple? Or maybe about your favorite thing to do when running on the beach (“How many today?” “Fifty-four unique pairs.”)?

The only story that I could think of that would have been even vaguely appropriate would have been a slightly edited version of the Britney Spears story. Let’s see, it would have gone something like: You went to visit your Mom, Britney was a few beach chairs down. Your mom suggested asked why you didn’t go for you, and you say something to the effect of “She’s not nearly good enough for me.”

There’s be a laugh, and I’d get to create one of those great rejoinders about how you were right, and that I’m happy that you did finally find someone special enough in A.

At the time though, I couldn’t justify comparing A. to Britney. A. is simply to beautiful, respectable, and cultured (and that’s not exaggerated because she might be reading this). Drawing any comparison would have left a bad taste in my mouth, even with the quip at the end. Still, if you ever have a question, A., remember, this is the guy that refused to even pursue Britney Spears back when she was actually vaguely attractive. Elliot has always had impeccable taste.

Anyway, I wanted you to know that I put at least some actual thought into the toast. I just couldn’t get it out, and still manage the l’chaims. I think the reason I forgot the mental section was that I was saying “l’chaim, l’chaim, l’chaim” over and over to myself so I could pronounce it correctly. Or, at least that’s the story that I’ll stick to in the future if someone asks.

I overdid it dancing. I have some tests for my neck injury tomorrow, otherwise I would spend the next day (and probably week) in bed. But with hits like Dancing Queen and It’s Raining Men, how could I refuse?

Actually, I did get some nice slow dances with M. and A. With the broken neck, there we my speed, although I would have loved to try a few more of the faster dances. No one expects you to dance very well at weddings, and it’s a great time for me to make a total flailing idiot of myself without anyone being able to say anything.

I said something about getting up off my death bed to be there, and now after the fact, that still holds true. It was so nice to be doing something fun with real friends. It was by far the best thing that’s happened to me in the last three months.

So, the official wedding kitup is in my bag, and when I get home I plan on keeping it with the garter I caught at Mike’s wedding. I figure it’s a good way to keep my memories of good weddings all in one place.

Ah, right, one final point: flying sucks. You get there on time and they change the flights around on you. I’m not supposed to be doing wind sprints through secure areas with a broken neck.

Snow & Expansion

So, aparently the only thing that's different when you're snowed in with a broken neck is that there are other people around. We got two feet of snow here in the last two days, which is more than my family can remember since we've moved to our new house (10 years ago, give or take).

My brother, my uncle and a friend were coming back from a ski trip in Colorado, and couldn't make it to Albuquerque, so they stopped here instead. Yesterday they couldn't even get out of the driveway, so they were stuck here.

Except for the complete lack of cable and internet, it might as well have been another Friday/Saturday for me. We watched the Incredibles, Hero (with Jet Li) and played some psuedo-poker because none of us knew the rules very well. Later, we went out in the snow and I dumped a shovel of snow onto my uncle's friend Neil. Dinner was good, and I stayed up late.

In serious injury news, I'm feeling a lot better. My neck is still sore, but it almost never hurts. I can't run, but I feel like I should be able to do things again.

Incidentally, here's a follow up to yesterday's (backdated) post:

I've resigned myself to an eventual split, but what do I actually see happening to America in reality? Nothing.

Nothing at all.

We'll keep trading congress and the presidency between a left faction and a right faction for years. Occasionally we'll learn to hate someone enough that the other side will win big for a few years but we won't actually see a President or congress that is willing to step away from the center line for fear of being voted out.

Science fiction has an interesting solution to this: expansion. One of the things that I believe kept the early United States so stable was expansion into new terrain. Eventually we broke down into the civil war, but that was after the "brackets" were firmly in place. The country is getting smaller and smaller, and loosing your personal space is going to make anyone upset.

I've mentioned before that Hawking says that we're going to have to expand to other planets in order to survive as a species, and two posts ago I mentioned that in my books humans have the ability to expand out into space.

Ignoring the very real problem of terraforming, if you have the entire universe to search, you'll most likely come across a few planets that are ready for human habitation. A few seeds, a few cows and sheep, and it'll be like a new western frontier.

The people that are going to be the first to expand out aren't going to be astronomers and scientists, it's going to be the people that are in such desperate circumstances that they figure that a new planet can't possibly be worse than where they already are. Joss Whedon's Firefly suggests that the two languages that survive are going to be English and Chinese, but I think he made a mistake when he suggested that it was going to be American English.

I think that it's going to be British English, with a distinct eastern Indian accent.

Of course, the Americans will probably end up controlling the first few settled planets (or the Chinese will, if America collapses), but India has the people and the rate of expansion to eventually fill those planets, and then move on to more.

American ingenuity is a nice concept, but I suspect that most American Christians aren't going to want to go anywhere off-planet just in case Jesus comes looking for them. As far as I know, Hinduism doesn't have the same restrictions. Life is life, be it on Earth or on Alpha Centauri V.

After all, India does have a rising population of English speaking engineers and programmers. I think that it's entirely possible that Kaylee should have a bindi.

As an afterthought, Muslims aren't going to want to go off planet either. A pilgrimage between planets is going to be that much harder than a pilgrimage between continents. I don't see any problem with Jews, Buddhists or Hindus exploring space, although I'm sure there are a few sects out there of each that are going to remain tied down.

Anyway, with expansion to the stars, once again the social pressure on the population is reduced. The Puritans have set out for planet Plymouth, and all of the criminals can be plunked down on planet Australia. Hermits can have entire snowy continents to themselves instead of needing to resort to mail bombs. Second sons can own go claim their own land.

Expansion produces and interesting social dynamic, and I think that it's one that we've almost forgotten about.

Out & Around

Over the last couple of days I've been able to get out a little bit. I was hoping that I could go back to work for Christmas because I know that noone wants to work on Christmas, and most of the people that I work for are Catholic. I was hoping that I could go in for four hours so that someone could stay home.

That turned out to be overly optimistic. I couldn't get a ride, and there were some other problems.

Instead we went out to the buffet at the Eldorado, which is a big fancy hotel downtown. We did this instead of exchanging presents, becuase it's fairly expensive. It was okay, although I didn't eat nearly as much as I should have. Everything was so rich that I just couldn't pack it away. The Sea Bass with polenta just melted in my mouth. Everything else was good. For desert I had a piano sculpted out of dark chocolate, with a white chocolate keyboard and filled with custard and berries.

The problem is, I don't know if I want to be with my family. I mentioned that I like the family idea of the holiday, but my mother has pulled away from me, more than I've pulled away from here, and my little brother is just gone. If I wasn't related to him, I wouldn't have any reason to talk to him at all.

It's a bitter question, and I don't know the answer. That tends to make me sort of angry and defensive, and I tend to take it out on my family. When I'm on my own, when I'm with friends, I almost never get like that, maybe because I know that at least it's my choices that have brought me there.

I met Steve and Andrea this week after Christmas. I've known Steve for a fairly goo amount of time online. More than a year probably, and he's been a moderater with me for a couple of months. They were nice enough to drive me around, and offered me the front seat of their truck so I didn't have to climb around in the back of their truck.

This is the first time that I've had a chance to actually play tourguide for actual Catholics, which is sort of cool because Santa Fe is fairly religious, and a couple of the cool sites to see are churches.

So, they came by on Tuesday, and then today as well. We spent more time at my work than we should have, in retrospect. Of course, none of my co-workers recognized me. I could pass them and wave and they still wouldn't know that it was me. The strangest thing is that some random person in a shop that's seen me twice recognizes me but my co-workers didn't.

We should have hit up more of the museums, and probably done Canyon Rd. as well. If you're going to spend two days in Santa Fe, spending some time on Canyon Rd. is a good idea. Instead we hit a sale at the Nambé Factory.

On their way out of town today they dropped me off so that I could get fitted for a tux for Elliot's wedding, so now I'm all set for that.

It's so nice to be getting out a little bit, even though I'm exhausted afterward.

No Christmas

So, I realized sometime today that I didn't know when Christmas was, as in I had no idea how many days away it was. I had to check a calender to see what todays date was and then I had to check to see when Christmas was (yes, I know how moronic that is. The date had just slipped my mind for some reason).

I've been a strong atheist for probably a bit more than a year now, and before that I was determinedly agnostic for the better part of my life.

My mother is a bad Catholic and only my father knows what my father believes, and we've always celebrated Christmas, and most years we celebrate at least one night of Hannukah, and/or Winter Solstice, and/or New Years.

This year though, things are a bit different. We're not exchanging presents this year, for one. That makes it easy for me, because since I broke my neck I don't have much money or the ability to do arts and crafts. Instead, we're going to drive into town and each a fancy brunch at a hotel.

And, everyone's worried about my brother, who's a Marine reservist that will be shipping back to Iraq in January.

Altogether, it doesn't feel like a holiday season. Everything feels not much different than mid-February. I don't see holiday displays because I'm not out and about, and I'm not worried about Christmas because I don't have to plan for it. I'll just sit at home until brunch. All the decorations are in my mom's place, and she doesn't have as many as usual because one of her dogs decided to start eating ornaments after six years of ignoring the tree.

I may be an atheist, but I like Christmas and the holiday season. I have to admit that it's nice to have the family around, and to get and give presents, and all the charitable and good will stuff that doesn't need a silly religious reason. The placement of Christmas, as a solstice celebration makes that fairly obvious.

I don't know, but without that feeling, I feel sort of alone and drifting. I mean, I've had problems with my family for years now, and the only reason I'm interacting with them on a constant basis is because I need their help with my broken neck. Since getting together isn't something special, and the holiday mood obviously missed me, I'm sort of worried about lashing out due to the dreariness of the whole thing.

Everyone's gone as well, and thats in even a more lonely place. Good Friend 1 called me a few days ago (or sometime. I loose track of when things happen as I don't have reference points). I actually had something I'd meant to give him for a while, but he's going to Florida for nearly a month.

Good Friend 2 didn't even say anything before he left. I was hoping he'd call or something, and I thought I dropped him an email, but I haven't heard from him. Stopped by his Myspace and someone mentioned that he'd left for a long trip to South America.

All this loneliness is also puzzling me because I know I'll see friends soon. I'll probably see rigs in a few days, and I'll see Elliot and maybe J. in January when I fly out to New York.

Still, everything's empty. I don't like that feeling.

Election 2006

Okay, first off, I'm already slightly wrong. My prediction here has not come true. I am no prophet, because things are changing.

But not really.

I was talking with my dad today about my fervent fever dream for America . . . a parliament.

Did you know that the 45 Democrat Senators represent more people than the 54 Republican Senators? Those statistics are for the Senate before the election, of course, and since that's done with, I'm not going to try to find the source for this again. The point still holds though, ours is not a representational government. The same is true for the House, though not to the same extent. Of course, in the House, the Democrats typically get a higher percentage of the vote in the districts that they win.

Brilliant.

So, due to the structure of our democracy, the people in power have no reason to make any changes, but let's talk about my idea anyway.

I have no idea what the real definition of "parliament" is, but, let me give you my definition:

A parliamentary house is a house that gives seats by a popular vote. This doesn't mean that you have a specific candidate when you vote. There is no person for your district with their name on the ballot. Instead of voiting for a person, you vote for a party.

Like, I would vote for the Gay Atheist Psuedo-Socialist Libertarian Party (yes, I realize the inherant contradiction in there). My mother would vote the Liberal Old Person Party. My brother would vote for the Marines Against Stupidity Party.

Now, you'd look at the total number of votes for each party nationally. Let's say that the GAPSL party gets 2 million votes. The LOP Party gets 3 million votes. The MAS Party gets 2.5 million votes. So, out of 15 seats, the gays would get 4, the old people would get 6, and the marines get 5.

Now, no party has a controlling majority, but obviously the old people have the upper hand. They form a coalition government by negotiating with the other parties, and select a Prime Minister from their party.

Now, if you want to get something done, you have to negotiate. The gays want to legalize gay marriage? The marines would probably object to that, but if the old people agree, then it'll pass. The marines want to invade another country? The gays would object, but if the old people agree then we're going to invade.

But, if the old people want to increase taxes to 50% income to pay for old people medication, the gays and the marines can join together and vote against them.

This means no more two party system, because nearly any opinion would be represented. If you're a economic liberal who only objects to abortion, you can vote for the democratic pro-life party. If you're a gay person that believe in (Goldwater/Reagan) conservative values, you don't have to vote against your own self interest by voting for the Republicans.

Granted, there will still be corruption, but watching the election coverage, I can still dream that some day I'll have some actual representation.

Also, I found something that I have to laugh at, even though it should be scary. At first look, this is a joke. I mean, could anyone really believe some of that stuff? But it's real. Poe's law, named after someone I've met at CF, states that an extreme satire cannot be distinguished from the real thing.

I have to quote one thing from Mr. Steele (emphasis his):

We can all work on purging the Republican Party of homos after this election is won. Right now we need to ensure that Republicans retain control of Congress. I shouldn’t need to remind anyone that we are still engaged in a war against Islamofacists who want to kill us. The Republicans are the only ones equipped to stand up to the terrorists and to keep us alive and I think you know that.

I mean, I may be gay, but at least I still live in the real world, right? I have something to tell Mr. Steele. We're undetectable, and you're never going to get rid of us.

One other thing: Steven Colbert is a genius.

Finally, I got my new wireless desktop, which probably doesn't sound like much, but for means that I can write again without having to put a huge strain on my neck. I'll still have to take it easy, but it means that I really have a lot more freedom than I had before. I can post blog entires again.

That's kind of exciting for me. I'm not limited just to reading anymore.

Gay Governor of Florida

Yeah, this is Florida, so I guess I'm not allowed to be surprised or anything, but the guy that they're about to elect to be Governor is gay . . . maybe.

The Broward-Palm Beach New Times is reporting . . . which will probably go unnoticed in most of the rest of the country. <link one> <link two>

Why am I writing about this? Because if you go to the print link on the second story, there's a picture of the 21 year old that is rumored to have slept with the soon-to-be Governor of Florida. The 21 year old Jason Wetherington is super-Republican, super-Christian, and sleeping with older men. And he's gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous.

Darn it. I'm way more upset about that than I am about the closeted gay guy that once again may be lying to people to get elected.

P.S. Update on me. I'm doing okay, I guess, but just leaning forward to research and write this is hurting my neck and shoulders. I'm not supposed to be typing. And I've been getting a lot of support, from Elliot (is that three "t"s?), from my extended family, and everyone, basically. It's been . . . 3 weeks since the accident, and I'm already in a mindnumbing place.

Satellite Internet & BSG

So, what's happened this week?

I suppose the big thing is that I got an satallite based internet connection. Finally.

I'm sitting at my desk, doing this from my home computer, which is so odd, because for months I've been forced to write during a few stolen minutes at work, or from a public hotspot or from a friend's connection.

The other big thing is that I finally saw the BSG premiere, and I loved it. They twisted everything. It's all about political satire and commentary. This should be required viewing for Poly-Sci people, it's just that good.

There was one more thing that I wanted to mention . . . what was it?

Oh, right, I broke my neck.

Specifically, I fractured my C-2 vertebrae last Saturday while I was driving to work. I was coming up Old Pecos Trail, and a woman in an SUV pulled out in front of me from my left.

I didn't have time to react. I think there may have been a car in the left turn lane that blocked both our views. I didn't have time to turn or slam on my break, or anything.

I think I remember the SUV. I think it was greenish. I'm not entirely sure. I know for sure that somewhere in there I thought about relaxing, trying to keep from being further hurt.

And then I rolled into the stoplight pole.

The driver's side window was completely shattered. I remember the glass was scattered over everything. I also immediately knew that something was wrong with my neck. It hurt, and so did my knee. When I had the Chiuaua accident, I had whiplash, so I immediately thought it was whiplash.

There was a guy standing there, with a cell phone, telling me not to move. There was smoke in the cab of the car. I didn't know it at the time, but it was from the air bag charge. Oh, the airbags had gone off. Had I mentioned that?

He asked if I wanted someone called, and I realized that this would be my first major accident where my mother wasn't right behind me. So I asked him to call her, but we couldn't reach her at the house, and I couldn't remember her cell phone number (We'd been joking about that, only last week).

Finally, the paramedics came. They had a lot of trouble moving me out because all my doors were locked. Finally, I pulled my keys from the ignition and gave them to the paramedic. She looked at them uncomprehendingly, and tossed them on the front seat.

I had to give her one of those looks, where you've been talking about the key to a lock, and someone hands you the key and you say, "What is this?"

"The key for the doors," I managed, and she finally understood, and crawled over me for the keys.

So I got a fun Ambulance ride to St. Vincint's. On the way, I kept replaying what had happened over and over in my head. I couldn't remember if the light had been red or green.

And I cried. I was sobbing, because I didn't know if it was my fault or not.

At St. Vincents a nurse asked me a couple of questions. What my name was. What my birthday was, and how old I was. And then the question I was dreading. "Do you have insurance?"

I didn't. I don't, I mean. I lost it Sept 30, and this was Oct 7. Ouch.

I started to cry again. With a broken neck, crying is very, very painful.

Then the cop came in. He asked me a couple of questions too, but I was pretty vague about everything. But he gave me good news. Very good news. It had been a redlight. For her. She'd been cited. It wasn't my fault.

So, then they left me alone. They'd put me in a box neck brace, and they had me on a hard backboard, and they left me alone.

And that was painful, and it got more painful over time. At first, I thought I could handle it, so I stayed quiet. A few minutes later I was quietly mewing. A few minutes later, I was calling for help, and then I was crying out as loudly as I could. No one came to check.

That was one of the worst moments of my life. I sat there, screaming out with pain, and no one even came in. I couldn't move because I was strapped to the bed, but I was testing the straps. I knew my neck was hurt, but at the time, I was willing to hurt it more, just to get out of the room. Pain is much easier to deal with when you have other people there.

When a doctor finally came in, I was just screaming. I don't think there was much real thought left. I do remember that I couldn't breath the oxygen through my nose because mucus was filling them from the crying.

He moved me around, and things began to get better right away, thankfully. The pain went away, partially, but somewhere in there they told me that I had a broken neck.

I wasn't drugged for the longest time, but what happened at St. Vincent's is still very unclear.

I got my first helicopter ride to the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque. I was drugged up quite significantally for that, but apparently I'm still too tall, because they had trouble fitting me into the helicopter.

At UNM Hospital, I was checked into the Trauma ER under the name "TRAUMA-ALERT, PAINT." Later, I found out that that was normal for helicoptered patients. They asign them names ending in "TRAUMA-ALERT" so that they can keep records on them, and they assign a first name that sounds vaguely like "patient" to differentiate them. Apparently one of the popular ones is "petunia." They didn't change my name to my real name until the night that I checked out.

Most of my time at the hopsital was spent waiting for tests or waiting for results. I had maybe four completely different sets of X-rays, two CT scans, and a MRI.

After all of that, they didn't even do any surgery. They just gave me a "Miami J" neck brace, and let me go home. Granted, I'm not all that happy about that. I'm still in considerably large amounts of pain. I took two Hydrocodone two hours ago, and I'm not having fun dreams, and I still have pain.

That's as much as I can remember at the moment. I'll check in when typing isn't quite so painful.