The summer is gone; I remember it best...back in the good old world

Yeah...I'm still alive.

Still single.

Still bitter.

Still angry.

Still lonely.

C'est ma vie, eh?

More later, maybe. Maybe not. I mainly wanted to see if I could remember my login info for this blog and see if it could be pushed back into life somehow.

Been a long long long time

Wow! I still have a Blogger account?

It's still active?

Amazing :)

I should use it or something.

Lots has happened since my last post in March of 2006. Later that month, I went to Scotland and fell in love with Argyle. No, not the socks, the region in the southwest of Scotland.

Then, back to the grind of Chicago again. I actually went on a dating-spree during that time, but was not pleased with what I found. I got tired of the lies around the same time I got tired of the men and found that the effort being put into things was simply not worth the outcome, so I stopped that venture, resigned myself to the single life, and, since single people tend to be viewed as lepers of a sort by people in relationship, lost a lot of my friends to marriage or relationships.

So, yeah, I plod along, still making things and trying to find joy where I can. In the spring of 2007, I was invited by a friend in New Zealand to come out for a visit in 2008. And, in late January of this year, I was in New Zealand. Stupid me met a wonderful man from Australia while I was in New Zealand. So, I am now back in Chicago, pining for a guy in Australia who is fairly certain to not be doing the same for me.

So, that's about it. Not too much, but everything is up-to date here...in a way.

How have you all been doing?

I don't care if you don't care

OK, kids. Is it any wonder that my grandmother killed herself if she was expected to follow these little bits of advice in her life? My grandfather is just the kind of jerk to have probably thought in 1952 that she had to follow these demands and she probably thought she either had to or wasn't a good person. Those of you who know me probably know what my reaction would be.

I mean, f*ck. It's kind of obvious that, if this was written by a guy, he was having at least one affair and, if it was a woman, she was in extreme denial and probably having a bit of a diet-pill or valium and alcohol problem to deal.

f*ck this sh*t.

Another time, I might have fit in alright

My attitude for work is officially "bad".

When I walked into the conference room at the hotel last Wednesday at 6:15, I looked at my coworker and said "Today, my general attitude is 'f*ck this sh*t'." I was fed up with people signing up for our classes without reading the schedule or the list of topics covered and then coming in with questions not related to what was being taught. The time spent saying "That is not a topic for this course, but I will be happy to answer questions about that during a break or after class" caused a 45 minute delay in the schedule and, of course, NOBODY stayed after to ask those burning questions that they had to ask and thus, divert the course of the, well, course.

When I called my boss to check in that morning, I expressed my displeasure with the attendees. I begged him to let me hurt them...just a little bit. He said "no." Piffle. Fine. I would kill a couple with kindness...minor mocking moments to turn their assinine questions into a shared joke that they would have to laugh with rather than admitting how stupid what they just asked really was, once they heard me repeat their question to them.

Yes. There are no stupid questions, but there are lots of inquisitive idiots.

The result? An evaluation score of 4.89 on a scale of 1-5. I guess my bad attitude paid off because, well, I didn't stress at all the whole day about it at all. Amazing what an attitude change can do, huh?

Of course, we'll see if I keep my job with this attitude change. If I can't, well, f*ck this sh*t, eh?

Somewhere I lost connections; ran out of songs to play

...well, maybe I haven't run out of songs to play. According to my weekend of mp3 player cleanup, I have well over 3400 songs ready and available--I even found some CDs I didn't realize I had. Oops.

Even worse, I rediscovered a used CD store a block away from my apartment that seems to have a very nice selection of techno/electronica. I found an obscure album by a Russian guy recording in France in English that I had been looking for since the middle of last year...and it was only $1.99. Sooo...my collection is definitely going to grow some more if there are more finds like that one.

I recently found myself getting in touch with a woman I haven't seen since my family moved out of a small town in northern Wisconsin when she and I were 12. She had found my email address in a guest-book for what would have been my graduating class had I stayed there. It is amazing to see how people change or don't after almost 20 years. She stayed in that small town (8000 people), got married, pushed out a few pups and works in the local Wal-Mart. She brought up a few of our old classmates from elementary school who stayed in town. They all seem to have intermarried and followed similar paths. She asked me what I had been up to. And, I told her...keeping things as simple as possible; where my family moved to, living in NL, college, grad school, present job and location. She was in awe of how much of an adventurous life I had.

Adventurous? Wow. That's really quite sad that my life is seen as being that.

It also makes me sad to think about how small-town America is vanishing. It makes me feel worse to know that I wouldn't go back...at least not seriously. There are times that I find myself daydreaming about winning the lottery and heading back, but joining up with a remote artists' colony outside of town. There is one that I have seen information about and, my last jr. high school crush from that town works there, making furniture and giving wilderness tours to school groups. Yeah, Roger (the crush) was a nature-boy I adored because of him being such a nature-boy. I also like to think that he liked me a little because of my own interest in those topics (he told me once that he was impressed by my plant identification skills and loaned me a book on tracking animals for silent-reading).

This started making me think again at how radically life can change from one path to the next with a simple decision. If I had stayed in the Netherlands instead of returning to the US to go to college, I know I would have continued in my IB program and then probably on to university in Scotland (the college counselor at my school in NL was a huge fan of St. Andrews and seemed to push students that way)...probably studying history...then maybe on to Glascow for graduate school where I would have met Neil Oliver and...

DAMN! That path could have led me to being the mother of Neil Oliver's children and I didn't take it. Oh well. Maybe next life.

Get the cool shoeshine

Parents, especially mothers, have a superpower--SuperGuilt. They have a way of being able to dispense advice about something they know nothing, making assumptions about their children based on what the child did when they were five, and then making the child feel like crap even though it is 25 years later and they are a complete, developed adult who is usually very in charge of their life. Had a series of mom-altercations this weekend. And, with the experiences of the last 24 hours, I now am able to pinpoint most of the reasons behind my eating disorder in college when I was a failed anorexic (I ate what an anorexic would, but gained weight). And now, in order to not fall into that self-loathing pattern, I am opting to tell my mother to either not give her "helpful" advice or simply f*ck off for a little while/go to time-out.

The weekend was very blah and relaxing. Time was spent at the gym and watching good and bad movies while cleaning my apartment, going through paperwork, and doing needlecrafts. I had a friend over yesterday evening whom I haven't seen in a couple months. He remarked on how "skinny" I've become, which was nice since I can't really tell what, if anything, has been lost. We then played Battlefront II and Tekken 5 and watched The Ringers.

There are times I am convinced I am a geek. I mean, hell, I game and find math to be soothing. However, it embarasses me to see the supergeeks in The Ringers and other gamer-geeks in action. Hell, the SCA crowd usually embarasses the hell out of me. Remember kids, just because you have a cloak doesn't mean it is something to wear in the mundane world...especially when waiting in line for a movie over 5 days in advance of the movie opening. That's just plain ol sad sad sad.

I also had a chance to think and grow irritated about an old friend. I flicked him on the nose a couple weeks ago regarding his seeming inability to treat me as a friend. The result? Daily emailS--yes, plural. I don't know if he is emailing because my flicking on the nose removed any delusions of strangeness, demonstrated my own knowledge of topics of great interest to him (thus, he wants to talk to get more info), or if he really realized that he was being a putz and should talk to me. Now, I wonder how long it will last until I suddenly am once again on the backburner of his attention-radar and what will cause it.

Oh the shark bites with his teeth, dear

A few days after the new year, I sent an email flick on the nose to two guys who claimed they wanted to be my friend, but from whom I received limited contact since. In my effort to have no regrets and to simplify my life, I asked them if they really wanted to hold up their end of the friendship deal or if they just wanted me to go away and to not bother them.

The result was that both have been pretty attentive. And the email conversations have been quite informative and fascinating--discussions of various fighting styles mainly.

So, these two guys I was so over...well, I am again not as over them as I thought (remember, I have major *thing* for martial artists and both of them are...one much moreso than the other, but the "lower" ranking one is a third dan in tae kwon do and teaches longsword classes for part of his living). I'm being nice and good and just a jovial non-pressuring friend, but damn. In addition, I'm finding myself bringing Ali into conversations with both and feel like I am using him as a person on whom to transfer affection felt for the other two since I actually see Ali regularly in person.

Bad me.

Yes, the trainer crush started again last night as I was doing leg presses and we were discussing dating and relationships. I so badly wanted to tell Ali "Hey, if I wasn't paying you, I would ask you out in an instant." But, that would have most definitely added an uckie dimension to our sessions that would be bad.

My restraint is amazing at times...not only for not slapping the hell out of some people, but also for keeping my heart off of my sleeve to keep strangeness from entering improperly into professional relationships.

I hate being so responsible at times.

I love you--you pay my rent

Why does it seem to surprise people so much that government corruption exists? Influence-peddling has existed for as long as humans have existed. Just take a look at the forming of alliances via marriage throughout cultures. The most valuable brides and grooms were not so because of their abilities or because of any emotional reasons...it was because of how much land their family owned or how many cows they had.

Forming an alliance with a powerful family by giving them something of value (a daughter or son with a dower or a bride-price) was supposed to secure your family's future and get an edge, if necessary, over the other families if things got tough. As a result, wouldn't it be logical to think that people with this attitude survived to pass it along to the next generation? So now, thousands of years after the practice started, of course lobbyists and corporations are going to try getting favors from those in power by paying money or taking them on trips to Scotland to play golf or taking them to US protectorate with their families for tropical vacations so they will protect the slave-labor-like manufacturing and prostitution industries there from prosecution. Hell, some lobbyists for major naughty industries even marry the politicians they originally met to influence...is this just a throwback to the arranged power-play marriage? hrmmmm?

We all do it. Just look at the simple personal politics of gift-giving at birthdays or around the holidays. Where should the line really be drawn though?

Can a line really be drawn and stuck to completely?

And, most importantly, how do you know who is really your friend and who is just keeping in touch with you just in case you can prove to be of use to them in the future for a monetary, emotional, or physical pay-off? hrmmmmm?