Just Words

Hi,

Remember me? I'm your ex-roommate's childhood friend. I've seen you around quite a bit at ball games and going-away dinners for quite a while now but I can't say I know you very well. But you're cute, and you look fun, and there's no better reason to get to know someone better. As a matter of coincidence, you work at the video store closest to my house and lately I've noticed that you seem more talkative when I'm at the counter. A few days ago, I asked you to go with me to see Sin City this weekend. You sounded enthusiastic but you said that you had to check your work schedule and you would get back to me. Normally I would be too shy to just ask you out like this. I had to come up with a lame reason for even asking you out so that I could soften the possible embarassment rejection. My reason? I don't know anyone in Kelowna and I really don't want to go alone. Which is true but it's just not the real reason I asked you to go.

I'm moving this week so I knew I was running out of chances to surreptitiously run into you, at the movie store or otherwise. Tonight, I returned a movie that I rented last week. You noticed me when I walked into the store but you were busy with a lineup of customers so you had to get back to them. Ordinarily, I would linger in the New Movie section and pick something out so that I could take it up to the counter and chat. But as I mentioned, I'm moving and I was really in a hurry because I still have a lot of cleaning to do. Besides that, I really won't have time to watch any movies in the next few days and soon I'm moving to the other side of town and I don't want to have to return a movie that far away.

Anyways, the point I'm trying to make is that I had to walk around the counter (and thus right past you) to get out of the store. I planned to give you a quick wave and acknowledging nod of the head as I walked past because you were too busy for a hello. I couldn't justify doing anything extraordinary to get your attention because it's not like we're dating by any stretch of the imagination. I looked right at you as I was walking past but you were on the phone and I don't think you noticed me walk straight out the door. I'm hoping you don't think I snubbed you or anything like that, because I didn't. I was just in a hurry. After I got out of the store, I realized that I could have just used the outside drop box and avoided this whole thing but it just never occurred to me.

This whole thing has "Seinfeld" written all over it. I'm now sitting in my house scrubbing walls. I want to call you and casually ask you about your work schedule while (also casually) explaining my behaviour in the video store earlier. But I'm not sure what time you'll be getting home from work and I think it will be too late to call because it's later than the latest hour you could call a person you don't know very well. I now have to come up with an excuse to call you tomorrow and hope that I haven't given away how much of a desperate loser I am. I would send you this email but I don't know your email address or even if you have one that you check regularly. So I will post this to my blog in the hopes that your ex-roommate left the link bookmarked on a computer that I'm not sure you have in your home. And that you'll check it in the next few days and read these words. And that you'll understand that I'm not a psycho because of my neurotic overthinking but really just a guy who's concerned about what people think of him. That's a lot to hope for. But right now hope might be all I've got.

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"Recently Martin Kruskal and his collaborators have unexpectedly
discovered brand new completely integrable systems, and I have helped
clarify some things about such systems.

I was able to analyze, with my student Dave Levermore, what happens to
solutions of dispersive systems when dispersion tends to zero.

It is a rather surprising new phenomenon, but not easy to express in
layman's terms. In a report to the American Philosophical Society I
put it into the form of haiku:

Speed depends on size
Balanced by dispersion
Oh, solitary splendor."

-Dr. Peter D. Lax, professor emeritus at New York University

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I'm moving this week. My new landlord doesn't know when I can start moving in and won't promise that it will be before noon on Thursday. My old landlord will be looking over the old place tomorrow afternoon and has already expressed her desire that I be vacated before noon on Thursday. My dad (and his truck) won't be back this week to help me move like I had hoped. But am I worried? Not yet.

In the past few weeks, I've been able to contribute to several complex technical solutions at work. It's made me feel very at home there, which I haven't really felt in quite a while. I've always enjoyed solving puzzles. Engineering provides an endless stream of problems to solve as well as a purpose to my efforts. Today I was offered the opportunity to learn a whole new area of radio compliance testing. I'm excited. I've been given this opportunity because I've proven my experience and usefulness. Now I have to prove the same qualities again. You could wish me luck, but it really won't help. The only thing standing between me and my goals is me... and my goals...

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Today is her birthday. But I'm not going to call her. It was on her birthday last year that everything fell apart. I knew she was using again. Or at least that she wanted to which, for an addict, is the next worst thing. I still remember that night like it was yesterday. The other people she had surrounded herself with (she called them "friends") didn't care enough to try to stop her. They were just as comfortable letting her go off and do whatever she wanted while her son slept at home waiting for her. And when I stood in her way I felt the anger that everyone else was afraid of. She screamed. She brought up embarassing moments of my life that only close friends know and threw them at me like poisoned daggers. At that moment she would rather have thrown me out of her life than have to admit to me what she was doing.

I think that must have been the worst thing for her. She tried so hard to convince people that she was clean. She wanted to preserve her dignity. But it was a facade. There is no dignity in cocaine use. The only dignity you can have is leading people you know to think that you don't do it. She wanted to be clean so bad that if she couldn't really be clean then the next best thing would be for her friends to think she was clean. But she wasn't fooling anybody. Everybody knew. The only difference between me and her other friends was that I wasn't willing to pretend that I didn't know just so she could preserve her "dignity".

But that night, after she screamed and fought and tried to trash me. Tried to demean me. Tried to throw me away. After she did all that she saw that I was still standing resolutely in front of her. Not backing down. Not giving in. Not allowing my purpose to be deflected by responding to her insults. At that moment she saw that, even if I didn't see her doing it, even if I didn't get someone she did it with to confess, I still knew. At that moment, the carefully constructed house of cards came crashing down. And she ran.

It was her first instinct. Every conflict, at its basest level, comes down to one age-old, instinctual decision. Fight or flight. Based on past experiences I was sure she would have chosen to fight. She has a terrible temper and she doesn't back down from anyone. She has attacked grown men twice her size without hesitation. One night she beat up a much larger woman with her shoe. But not that night. That night she ran away for god-only-knows what reason. Maybe it was a sign of her attitude changing. But I doubt it from what I've heard of her exploits since then.

No, that night she ran away. And I tried to follow her because I knew that she shouldn't be alone and that I wouldn't be able to rest until she got home safely. And a well-meaning bouncer decided that it wasn't a good idea for me to follow her. I could have used a little stress relief at that moment and a tussle with a bouncer is always good for blowing off steam but that moment wasn't about me. Getting into a fight outside the bar was the last thing in the world that was going to get her home. So I just stood there and glared at him meaningfully. He kept telling me that he was her friend and that I was drunk and needed to not bother her. That was the ultimate irony. This musclebound idiot claiming to be her "friend" because he'd talked to her at the bar a few times, "protecting" her from me. The guy who actually was her friend. Who actually was trying to protect her. I guess every guy wants to be the one protecting the girl. But for those who actually are, the ones who are only pretending get really annoying.

In the end, she did get home safely. The next morning she was able to let her dignity-mask slip long enough to thank me for what I had done for her. But that was the last "real" moment I had with her. I wrote her a lengthy email hoping that she could talk about it while we weren't face-to-face but I received no response. Actually that's not entirely true. Her response was to show my email to everyone who would read it and try to laugh it off like my "accusations" had no basis in reality and I was a delusional fool. So I gave up. I let go. I decided that the pain of watching her slip further and further into the shit every weekend was too much to bear. And to have what little help I could offer openly ridiculed was like a knife in my back. I've spoken to her on the phone since then but it's been shallow, meaningless conversation. And I won't be calling her today.

I hope that she finds a way to cope with her life and whatever demons are driving her. I have no idea if she's still using but it wouldn't matter now. She would have to apologize for what she did before I could trust her again. And I don't think she'll be able to go back to that place. More likely she will attempt to bury it like so many old skeletons when the closet gets full. I replay these events on their first anniversary because its important to never forget the things that drive us to the places we are now. I'm a long way from where I was this time last year. Hopefully, I can go farther.

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Eating dirt isn't much fun if you try to do it on purpose. It's much better if you're just playing in the dirt and some happens to get in your mouth. And then you grind it up a little. Wipe the back of your dirty hand across your face to remove your hair or some sweat or something and you smear good clean dirt across your lips. Dirty faces or, perhaps more accurately, perfectly clean faces covered by a layer of dirt. Ankle-deep in mud puddles and shoes soaked through all summer long until they totally rot right through so you have to buy new ones in the fall. That's what being a kid is all about. Toys are some kind of sick, materialistic, status-thing that the marketing madmen dreamed up to make more money. The best toys were always the simplest toys. You could do more with a piece of string than a Spider-man action figure any day. The only reason to buy Spider-man is because string is supposedly what kids play with when their parents can't afford Spider-man. I love capitalism but I hate marketing.

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So you've been helping this Orc Warrior for, like, 20 minutes and it's starting to get frustrating. He's too high a level for this quest and you want to tell him but you're too polite. He really wants to finish it, which is cute but annoying at the same time. You finished this same quest days ago now and you have bigger things to accomplish. You'd like to just ditch this guy but you know you're going to need his help with that elite quest you've been putting off so you humour him and hope it doesn't take too long. This guy is way too neurotic for your taste and he's very demanding and pushy about the most ridiculous things. You're definitely not adding him to your Friends list even though you already told him you did. All you want is to finish off the quests you have in this region so you can move on to bigger and better things.

You're cooking breakfast while trying to tell him where to go and what to look for. You already burned your pancakes ever-so-slightly and your bacon turned out much crispier than you'd like and your eggs are now gently overcooking on the stove. You want to get up to check them but you keep telling yourself that it's too early because you only want to get up once to flip them and then once more to serve them and it's better if they're a little overcooked than undercooked. You hate days like this. A quest log full of elite quests and you don't know anyone online that you can reliably turn to for assistance. You did everything right, too. You joined a guild with a hip name filled with young, ambitious up-and-comers in the game but there's never more than 3 online at one time and they're all in far off territories. You can never seem to find a healer for the elite stuff, either. Always the same story. The battle-hungry Warriors and Hunters of the world are salivating at the chance to charge into the rough stuff and the Shamans, Druids, and Priests are demuring for the lighter stuff. Typical.

You remember when you were just getting started in this game. You were a young, idealistic Night Elf Druid. The world held so many wonders. The Night Elf encampments with the spiralling ramps around the outsides of giant trees leading up to rooms carved from the insides like woodpecker's dens. The mystic Moonwells and mysterious magics mastered at the training facilities. You could go anywhere. Do anything. Dive into the water. Climb the slopes. Jump from tree branch to tree branch. The world seemed so big and beautiful and unpixellated. Sharp images of seemingly insignificant details like the flowers that grew on the sides of the road that led to the first big Night Elf city you ever saw. You got lost there and had to consult your overhead map several times and you couldn't seem to recall where everything was after you had seen it once and moved past.

You had big dreams of one day getting to level 60 and commanding a legion of Hunters into battle against the Horde masses. And in your fantasies the Hunters were all lined up in a perfect line showing excellent military discipline because you would expect nothing less from your crew. And they would draw their bows in unison and fire large volleys of arrows into the enemy position. The trumpets would blare sounding the charge of your mounted Warriors and Paladins as they thundered across the plain. Fire would rain from the sky as your Warlocks and Mages called on the heavens to punish the enemy for daring to show up on this field of battle. Priests would call on the gods to intervene on behalf of your cause. The troops looked so clean and polished in your daydreams back in those lofty days of yore. The world held so much promise and potential glory.

You try not to think about those dreams much these days because it only reminds you how different the reality is. The strange, naturalistic buildings of the Night Elves were very comparable in uniqueness to the Tauren practice of living on impossibly steep-sided bluffs connected with suspension bridges and lift systems. Or the underground homeland of the Undead so adequately called Undercity. But you don't look on the architecture with much wonder anymore. The sparkle has left your eyes and you don't stop to admire the flowers on the roadside any longer. Now you're fully strapped into the system. Completing the next quest and getting your experience bonus is the only thrill you have anymore besides, perhaps, gaining a few new abilities from the class trainer every other level-up. Your dreams of being an all-powerful level 60 character seem even further out of reach since you overheard some talk on the General channel the other day about the new patch due out in June that will raise the level limit making a level 60 character passe and commonplace.

You've been in heavy combat and you've seen the chaotic, scrappy, fight for life that goes on in those dungeons. The way trained fighters will run like babies just to live a few moments longer. The armor doesn't seem to glow or gleam unless it's been enchanted and even then the effect looks like someone is trying too hard to impress. And as for the Horde and this endless conflict, you started a Horde character yourself about a month ago just to see how the other half live. Although their skin is green and until recently they openly worshipped demons they are a strong race with good moral values, and you can respect that. You've come to realize that the Orcs, Trolls, Taurens and even (gasp) the Undead are just people trying to get by in this simulated world just like you. And that it was never them or their sacrilegious way of life that started this war but rather the people who created this crazy system in the first place. If anything, you should identify with them because they are more like you than the people who set up the rules in this mixed up place and time. And maybe when you've finished killing each other (and subsequently been brought to life by the nice angel-spirit-lady) you can share a beer with them while recovering from your resurrection sickness, speaking in tongues and making frantic hand gestures (or maybe a little interpretive dance) in an attempt to relate how crappy your day has been.

No, you've changed from a wide-eyed noob to a disgruntled, embattled, front-line grunt in just a few short months. Is this what war is like? Is this what it does to people? Where is the glory? Where are the spoils and riches you were promised? When are the raids of your home territory going to stop? When do you get to give a little back? Right now you'd settle for a little less bombardment. Just a little more peace while you have the chance to get your bearings. Is that too much to ask? Where are the people who put you in this god-forsaken place? Why aren't they on the front lines of this war? While the goblins continue to make new war-machines with their "science" you just man our post and fill your designated spot in the rank and file. Just another warm body (or cold body, in the case of the Undead) in a uniform. Ready to take the hit while the person next to you hits back. Or maybe you'll be the one getting vengeance for your fallen comrade. Either way, does it all seem fair?

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I started work today at 1 PM. I'm trying to switch from an afternoon shift (3:30 PM til midnight) to a morning shift (7:30 PM til 4 PM) in stages. My uncle Kelly called at 4:30 saying that he was in town for one night only and would I like to go for dinner and a few beers. I left work at 6 PM. Two pints, a steak dinner, and 3 hours later I'm thinking about the consequences of my actions and how to deal with them. I told a certain person at work (not my boss) that a few certain things would be completed and on her desk before she got into the office at 7:30 AM. It will take approximately 2 and a half hours to accomplish these things. I have a rented movie that I must return tonight, no exceptions. This will take approximately 45 minutes. It would be nice to get some sleep between now and then as I'm recovering from a cold and I'd hate to sacrifice the progress I've made up to this point by keeping odd hours.

Now I have these options. I could go to Blockbuster now and from there carry on to the lab to finish off my work (Blockbuster and the lab are in completely different directions) only to come back home to sleep and getting back in to work whenever I make it in tomorrow morning. Or, I could go to Blockbuster now and when I come home try to go to sleep right away only to wake up at 4 AM to be at work by 5 AM to get all my work done in time. The first plan would be easier on my system because my boss would understand my sleeping in tomorrow until whatever time I can make it in. The second option would be more efficient because I wouldn't have to walk back and forth to work twice between now and tomorrow morning (about a half hour one way). The third option is to say "fuck it" to the whole thing, screw Blockbuster, play World of Warcraft tonight until 11 and go into work at the regular time with explanations about why everything isn't completed. The people at work are very understanding about this kind of thing so I know I won't get in trouble. Now here's the quiz. Which option do you think I'll pick?

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Napoleon is the ultimate geek. He lives in his own world and believes what he believes without thought or care for the consequences. His hair is a permed mess. His glasses obscure his eyes. His mouth hangs open in a constant rabbit-like display of his two top front teeth. He openly declares his affection for the kinds of things that teenagers in high school are strictly forbidden (by the secret and ever-changing rules of "coolness") to express.

High school is a dangerous place for a teenager. Jealous girls spitting venom across the hallways as you walk through. Shipwrecked hearts sunk by loose lips of gossip and treachery ready to snag the unsuspecting passerby. Ferocious animals battling each other every day, clawing their way up the food chain hoping that a little luck and perseverance can win the day. Emotions that ran as slight trickles in childhood suddenly rushing like spring floods carving new paths toward the sea. In some ways it amazes me that anyone survives the experience.

If you took anyone and stripped away their vanity, their need to lie about the insignificant and inane things they think about when they're alone, you would be left with Napoleon Dynamite. The purest and most honest form of human life over the age of 12.

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It comes as no surprise that I find myself turned on by smart television. Plots which are not driven by the whips of painfully placed exposition. Characters which are not beaten into shape by the bludgeons of overexposure and typecasting. Storylines interwoven like fine tapestry. Characters who are both murderous and compassionate. Entire plot turns that are explained with only a well-placed glance or nod of the head. Entertainment that actually requires that you pay attention and think rather than tune out to the mindlessness of petty conflict (Wrestling anyone?). Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you, Deadwood.

And on an unrelated note, Sin City starts in 28 days.

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Right. So we all complain about our parents sometimes. Does it come as any surprise to anyone that the issues we voice to our friends about our parents do not exactly echo the things we say to our parents? Perhaps some of us try to address the issues with our parents but we use different words. We approach things differently. Does it make us two-faced to not tell our parents exactly how we feel?

Show of hands, how many people don't know exactly how to deal with their parents? Parents come from a diferent time and place. They have had bad experiences in their lives that they try to stop us from having. They have given us a new view of the world and they are simultaneously frustrated when we don't see things their way.

How many people have mothers who want to steer them in some direction or other? It might be career or appearance or simply the way we relate to other people. Most mothers worth their weight in salt feel that their opinion should be considered above all others. Their advice sounds more like a direct order than a gentle persuasion. This is called 'mothering'. Why does it sound so much like 'smothering'? Coincidence? Maybe.

I don't know how to deal with my parents. Either of them. Typically it's far easier to agree with them than to disagree, even when I know they're wrong. I was raised to have respect for them. Above any other consideration. So when something happens where either of them sticks their nose too far into my business it's hard for me to tell them to screw off, even if that's what I'm really feeling. But I might tell my friend that I want to tell my parents to screw off.

It's easier to tell your friends personal stuff about yourself, as opposed to your immediate family. Close family members want to immediately fix your problems and make everything better. They will step into your business when perhaps you think they shouldn't. For friends, this is different. Friends will want to step in and do all those things but (usually) they know that it's not their place. They might offer a helping hand but they will still accept you if you do not accept it. Family will take it as a personal insult when a helping hand is turned away.

Also, it's easier to listen to a friend's problem as opposed to a close family member. A friend's problem might make you sad or might cause you to think about them at various times during your day. But you won't feel as directly affected as you would knowing about family problems. I know myself that listening to my mother's problems makes me agitated and edgy. I want to eliminate the things that cause her discomfort. I want to put my nose where it, technically, doesn't belong. I want to solve her problems for her whether she wants me to or not. After hearing about things that make her sad, I feel sad. Sometimes profoundly so. She's my mother. I can't help it.

So, yeah, maybe I do understand my mother when she says things that I might wish she didn't. I have felt that urge to do whatever it takes for my close family. But I still don't know how to tell her when she irritates me. I still don't know how to deal with her or deflect her when she says potentially embarassing things about me. I still don't know how to do that.

So, I'm sorry Mom. I'm still learning here. Please forgive me when I talk about you behind your back. Please try to understand that I mean no disrespect. In fact, it's a sign of the huge amount of respect I have for you that I will not say the same things to you as I might say to other people. Please try to understand that when I talk about you to my friends they know that I only say the things I say because I'm your son. They don't think you're a bad person or anything like that.

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