I just had a depressing realization. Places (like thunder bay) always seem more romantic when one is reading about them, looking at maps, looking at pictures, and fantasizing about them. In reality, it's very, very unlikely that I'd be able to afford lakefront property, and that I'd end up in some bedroom community. My routine would consist of going to my little apartment (where I'd spend my free time on the internet) and to work in the service industry, possibly in the adjacent strip mall. I think there's just not much out there for me. Maybe working on a fishing boat, joining the army, being a bum or being a heroin addict would be different.
Most everywhere is basically the same. There's work, home, the drive in between, and the existence of some natural wonders that are a bit of a ways away. These always exist, whether they happen to be lake superior or a dinky state park and artificial lake. The immensity and power of lake superior won't be apparent from some provincial park in thunder bay -- it'd look like a rocky beach peppered with some trees. There are other places to experience water and trees, such as seneca state park in montgomery county, Maryland.
I'm inclined to think that what makes one happy in any locale is a fulfilling job and fulfilling company. If one has a job one can do competently and a wife-type partner-thing, then locale is subjective. Well, not really. For instance, a job and a wife in a sewer full of acid wouldn't be as fun as a job and a wife in southern france adjacent to a vineyard facing the mediterranean sea. Although one can find beauty in anything, it's easier in some places than others. In order of importance: good wife, good job, good location. Maybe the most important is the ability to look on the bright side, which I have trouble with.
Maybe it'd be smart to go somewhere that has a lot of pretty girls (ie, a lot of people) and a lot of jobs; ie, a lot of people. Ie, a city. I don't like cities. Perhaps a city with some natural beauty to it? Like san francisco! Haha. I give up.
I want a place out in the country where I can find a wonderful partner (maybe) and a wonderful job (certainly) and be surrounded by spectacular natural beauty (probably). Maybe close to an art museum or two, or perhaps a university or two. Thunder bay might be the best choice -- the best compromise. Also, I'd get free health care. HAHA YOU SUCK YOU KNOW YOU'RE JEALOUS. Sorry; had to get that out.
One of my problems is that it's a lot of effort for me to ferret out, navigate to, and get up the resolve to shuttle around to nice places in the surrounding area. I'm not sure if it's worth it. Probably. But I'd prefer if the museums, universities, girls, job and natural beauty were right outside my door.
I guess you can't have everything. Except with death -- there, you can have it all. Have It All (And More) With Death! (tm)
Before I left for concord, I took a web-quiz that helped determine where I'd like to live in the united states. It seemed to be a helpful and accurate tool. Almost all of my results were small towns in oregon or vermont. I wish I could find a similar test for canadian cities. Maybe there just aren't many of them (canadian cities). Here are the ones I know:
quebec city
montreal
ottowa
toronto
thunder bay
windsor
winnipeg
calgary
vancouver
victoria
I tried to arrange those in east-to-west order, but I may have gotten it wrong.
Things fall into place for some people, and not for others. I'm sure you've run across those who seem to be 'lucky', and for whom positive life-events fall into their laps without a great deal of effort on their part. I'm inclined to think that this has very little to do with luckiness as it does to do with a certain attitude, perhaps unconscious, and approach to life.
On a bigger, cosmic scale that doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with the way we live our lives, ultimately fate is the supreme causal agent, and those who work out their lives well only do so because past events allow for it; they could not have had any other attitude or approach.
I refuse to get into another free-will vs. Determinism debate with myself, and I especially refuse to mention those two words beginning with a 'q' and an 'm'.
Ok, just a little bit. The big buzz-phrase now among amateur theorists looking for a way to confirm their world views is that one can 'create one's own reality' with quantum mechanics. This is dumb.
The main feature of qm is the heisenburg-ish, chaos theory-ish impossibility of prediction; the inherently random structure and events of and in the universe. What's going to happen isn't pre-determined by preceding causality -- a point moving through time can move along a decision-tree in any possible way, and there's no way of knowing which path it will follow. Here's a diagram of a pinball falling in something like a pachniko game (drawn in 'ms paint' with a touchpad -- sorry):
In retrospect, we can say, accurately, that the pinball could not have ended up anywhere but where it did, which is an interesting paradox: is the end-location deterministic or random? It's both.
Buddah taught cause and effect, and that everything that happens is already set in stone by previous events. The impossibility of the ball's ending up anywhere but where it did is in step with buddha's teachings. But qm seems to foil them -- if the path of the ball is random, then how do previous events determine its path? They don't -- but, once the ball ends up via quantum randomness where it is, it could not have done any differently, simply because it is where it is, and the observer is there, looking at it.
Some people postulate that the ball ended up everywhere, and that there's a different universe containing each of the possibilities. I don't buy the 'many worlds' interpretation of qm. Even if I did buy it, it'd be irrelevant to us, because we're stuck in 'this' reality. Why is one particular path apparent? Why is what happened what happened? What happened to the other universes? Why this particular one?
'We create our own realities' is unfounded. Sure -- we don't know where the ball will end up, or where we will end up (even though the place we WILL end up will be where it will be). However, where we will end up is determined by randomness, and not will. Why would the brain, which isn't fundamentally different from any other bit of matter, be treated differently by the laws of nature than anything else? Why should it have the power to determine the path of quantum randomness while 'everything else' cannot?
'We' aren't creating anything. The illusions of 'we' are just part of the same substance that makes up all of the universe, and it all moves according to the laws of qm. 'we' aren't that special. I've starting using scare-quotes because 'we' and 'everything else' are illusions -- all is one substance. I'll stop, though, because it's annoying. I made my point.
We can't steer the pinball -- only the universe (or god, if you prefer those semantics) can. The end-point of a randomly-determined series of events is deterministic, simply because that series ended up (or will end up) where it did.
Every time Peter calls, I hear hanna ask him in czech 'do you want to talk to matt?' he never does. Sometimes I think maybe Peter and I don't like each other as much as we used to. Of course, it's possible that he's in a rush. But I know that he's not working, and this happens time and time again.
I recognize the inquisitive intonation, short phrase, usual position of the phrase relative to the conversation (right at the very end), the fact that this question is asked every time hanna gets a call from a son and I'm in the house, and my name in czech: matosh. I am a genius.
SDF is down again. I'm sure it has something to do with the recent netBSD upgrade. The implications for me are that I have no internet, since SDF is my provider, I have no email, I cannot publish blogs (I'm typing this up locally), I have no forum for social interaction, and I have no access to the bbs where I asked for advice on places to live in canada, as well as made some snide comments about migratory americans.
Thunder bay, ontario, is beginning to look good to me -- sunny, a port on lake superior, and privy to a somewhat-famous finnish restaurant that serves plate-sized pancakes. The climate is temperate (by canadian standards), being regulated by superior.
Lake superior is thrilling and frightening. It's something like 1,600 feet deep, is ocean-sized, huge freight ships have been eaten alive there by ferocious storms, and it looks, from far above, like the head and snout of some monstrous beast, with isle royale as its eye. Thunder bay doesn't feel landlocked and stuffy, since it's a stop along the st. Laurence seaway.
The st. Laurence seaway is a shipping road connecting north american lake-ports like chicago, detroit, windsor, thunder bay and erie with the atlantic ocean, by way of the st. Laurence river. The seaway has become less economically important during the last century because pacific ports have come to dominate north american ocean-traffic, but it's still used. A lot of the shipping industry, which was a foundation of local economies along the seaway, has closed down and rotted away.
Any town called 'thunder bay' off the north coast of a vast body of cold, deep water called 'lake superior' is necessarily an awesome place to live. The area is steeped in and influenced by the cultures of first nations peoples, the canadian word for what the u.s. Calls 'native americans' -- prehistoric asian land-bridge migrants. If I were prone to such silliness, I might say that thunder bay is probably a deeply spiritual place. Plus, it has a finnish restaurant.
The town's history is dominated by a few of those sprawling, mid-19th century corporations with disturbingly wide-ranging interests, which were responsible, via the profit-motive, for much of north american settlement and industrialization along the great lakes and within the canadian sheld. 'the hudson bay company', 'north west company' and 'canadian pacific railway' are examples. Companies like these grew into monoliths before enough of a government existed, in those northern reaches of the populated americas, to regulate them. They were gargantuan and powerful entities, sometimes with their own armies.
I feel like I've just written a report for mr. Senuda's 7th grade social studies class. A barnacle-blog made up of information; who would have thought it possible?
Thunder bay isn't as far a drive from Maryland as is vancouver, calgary, or even winnipeg, and my little car would be more likely to get there with a few miles still left under her hood. The question is: are there hot girls there? Or, at least, adoptable dogs?
This is my most recent idea. There are many possibilities.
COMING SOON!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (like, in a few minutes)
Actually, in a few hours, like at 11pm PDT. I have to go to fuckin work now HATYE HATYE H ATYE SAYG DDAFkgjadfxl;kgjalsdkfgjl;akj satan satan 66666
Ok, I'm back from friggin work. However, I have to go to sleep immediately because I'm leaving for work tomorrow at 8am, and must arise at 7am.
So, very briefly:
I'm coming home. Hanna doen't want me here, and I can't make it on my own with my salary and work-hours.
I wasn't imagining things about hanna yesterday -- she was upset, but not directly because of me. She had a realization that the landlord of her subsidized disability housing ('section 8' housing) would kick her (and me) out if I were found there, living with her and giving her money. Her cat is also not allowed in the new place, which is causing her additional stress.
Hanna's primary trait is an obsessive need to take care of everything all at once -- to resolve every problem and uncertainty, so she won't be surprised by new catastrophes. She needs to know where everyone is, what all future plans are going to be, and entertains fantasies of how her grown children can't take care of themselves, even though they're both married and own homes. This allows her to go on solving, or pretending to solve, their problems for them. She's come to rely on the psychological benefits this behavior, which include, but are not limited to, feeling useful and re-creating a domestic, 'leave it to beaver' past.
In fact, she is a bit sick of living with me, but it's not me per se. She 'needs her space', and it is indeed a very small apartment. As she told me, she needs to be alone when she's upset. The housing problems and uncertainties trigger all-encompassing uncertainty fears, as well as accompanying paranoia, emotional upset, and general craziness.
She told me during her morning outburst that, while I was at work today, she'd put up a curtain-partition between my room and the rest of the house, so she wouldn't have to see me. But, she settled for extending the phone cord into my room so I won't have to encroach on her space when I use the internet. That's what I'm doing now. I can hear her TV in the living room.
To hanna, I was another unknown she had to nail down -- specifically, where I might be living, since I can no longer live with her. She feels a need to take care of me, to solve the problem of my accommodations, and it causes her a lot of stress. She was making frantic suggestions all morning until I bought a ticket back to Maryland for the 21st. This calmed her down significantly.
This evening, she gave me suggestions on improving my life, in accordance with her style of housekeeping the cosmos. She told me to get a job I liked (she suggested security guard, library worker, or technical writer), and to find a girl who is more or less as crazy as I am. They were decent suggestions.
I can't live in the bay area on my salary if I don't have this arrangement, where room and board cost me $300 a month. Even if I were to find some shack in oakland to share with 15 mexicans, and then commute to 'the art store' every day via bicycle, I'd be treating myself to these hardships only for the privilege of living in an area I don't particularly care for, and not only because it's basically the worst place in north america to be poor.
I just this evening found out that the art supply store cut back my hours drastically -- this upcoming week I have only 16. So, I'm afraid even the oakland mexican-shack is out.
The bay area has too many people in it, has a gross superiority complex, there's too much money here, and the city-suburb model dominates the culture. Also, there's no winter, which would make me sort of insane after a while. But, this is all secondary. I couldn't stay here anymore even if it were paradise.
I only found my retail job at the art store after about a month of searching diligently, so I'm not encouraged about the possibility of finding a decently-paying job here within a few weeks.
When I get back to Maryland, I'm going to think about my options, which include moving back to canada. I've been considering calgary, which is just east of the rockies (dry) and decently north of the border (cold).
But, I don't know if that's realistic. I wouldn't have a support network, and finding a job there would be even harder, even though the cost of living would be a lot lower. I might end up at the mercy of canadian tax dollars (I'm holding on to the documentation of my brain-damage), which perhaps wouldn't be such a bad fate. Eh?
I hear there's now a waiting list for bi-coastal americans endeavoring to move to canada, as part of their mistaking disliking their current president for deep-seated sentiments of anti-americanism and the desire to totally abandon their culture. But, in the meantime, it's a nice brain-gain for canada as these over-educated lefties trickle upstream.
Of course, I'm american, as well as being canadian. I like and respect both countries, but I think canada is a better place for someone like me, who doesn't have a whole lot of money and is probably not going to get it. To the conservative, wealthy folks in the usa, I say 'congratulations on a successful self-interest'. I'm not being sarcastic here -- I admire them for their practicality. If I had a lot of money, I'd prefer to hold onto it too, and not have it taxed away to support ne'er do wells such as myself.
So anyway, for the time being (at least to get my car and bicycle), I'm heading back to and will be staying in Maryland. Hopefully, this won't last too long, although one of my options is to live out in western Maryland, where the weather, people, landscape, culture and wealth-distribution aren't quite so objectionable. One of my options is also a persistent vegetative state, either on a couch or in an ICU.
I have to come home. I'll be back on the 22nd, since my flight on the 21st leaves at 10:45pm. I think mark will probably drive me to oakland airport, and if not, it's very easy to get there by BART. I will not miss the BART.
Maybe not-so-very briefly.
I borrowed hanna's car again to visit my aunt nancy and my cousin joe, whom I'd never met. I think hanna is starting to get mildly upset that I keep taking her car. I've borrowed it to go to st. Helena twice, and a few times to go to various places in concord.
St. Helena is about 30 miles north of nappa, and is an hour or so away, in non-rush hour traffic, which I wasn't a part of on the way back to concord at 4:4pm. It took me perhaps an hour and a half to get home today. I don't keep careful track of these things.
Hanna seemed upset when I came home, and told me 'ok, I'm going to mark's place. I'll be back sometime'. Maybe I'm just imagining things, and committing my usual fundamental attribution error, but I think she was uncomfortable . The first time I borrowed her car I almost caused her to miss an appointment, since opening an account with the bank (what I was doing) took longer than I'd expected. She flipped out a bit then.
The next time seemed to be ok, but it caused her to have to walk around on her various errands that day. This time, I think she's started to reconsider her tolerance.
I brought her some salt-water taffies today, because I know she likes candy, but she seemed mildly uncomfortable when I gave them to her -- no 'thank you', but just a 'i think I've had something like this before'. She probably won't eat them. Then, I gave her $4 for the gasoline I burned today, and she looked at it as if I were handing her a jar of spiders. I've also noticed that it makes hanna very uncomfortable to be thanked for making me dinner, cleaning my room, making my bed, hand-washing my laundry, etc.
I think she sees it as her matronly duty to do all of these things, and me treating them as favors weirds her out. Most children don't thank their mother when she makes them dinner for the 10,000th time. As far as I can tell, hanna sees me as something close to one of her children, but maybe not worth quite as much as her actual offspring. A pseudo-child, or perhaps a mistakenly adopted child that you have some reservations about, but like most of the time anyway.
She was pretty clearly uncomfortable with my borrowing her car this time, but she's very unlikely to say 'no' to almost any request. The first time I asked to take it to st. Helena, she told me, when I expressed some concern about the inconvenience to her, that she'd just walk to the grocery store and to the BART that day. Most sane people, instead of bending over backwards to accommodate, would say:
no, you can't borrow my car. It's my only car, and I need it to get around. I go somewhere every day, and it just won't work to have my car gone for two days. Not to mention it's not in the best shape, and I want to avoid putting more miles on it than absolutely necessary. St. Helena is pretty far away, so I'm uncomfortable in that respect. So, sorry, but I don't feel comfortable loaning you my car. Maybe you should think about getting yours from Maryland, if you find that you're needing to get around that way. I was willing to make accommodations once, but it seems like these requests to borrow the car are coming a little bit too often. I'm really sorry, and I don't want to inconvenience you, but I don't really think it's a good idea.
But instead, hanna says 'ok!'.
So, I take the car, and she gets vaguely pissy and uncomfortable, then I give her salt water taffy, and she gets even more uncomfortable, then I give her money, and she gets even more uncomfortable, and finally she leaves for mark's house, which I don't think she'd planned to do until I started making her feel pissy and uncomfortable.
It can be argued that it's utterly not my fault: hanna should have said 'no' if she hadn't wanted me to take her car, and my being nice to her by giving her expense money and token presents should have made her happy. However, hanna is by no means a normal person, and perhaps I should be more in tune with the proper way to relate to her (possibly with major tranquilizers).
There's no way I can talk to her about this; her english and world-view wouldn't allow.
I could just give up and allow the relationship and situation to degenerate, which is maybe an inevitability because I really don't know the proper way to behave. It's not normal to not want to be thanked. I think maybe she would prefer to have her place to herself, and maybe I should think about finding other arrangements. But she'd never express this to anyone, even in czech to one of her sons.
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), the collapse of the hanna-arrangement would necessarily entail going back to Maryland, because there's no way I'm going to find room and board for $300 a month, let alone an included maid and cook. I can't afford anything else, even if after careful deliberation I decide skip the maid, cook, food, and food-shopping.
It's not possible to live in the bay area on my salary of $8.50 an hour. My living arrangements are temporary arrangement, even if they do turn out to work for an extended while; I'm not going to live with hanna forever, and even if I did, she'd eventually die, and then I'd be up a creek. Eventually, the impossibility of self-support on $8.50 an hour is going to come up.
Even getting $300 a month makes hanna uncomfortable; she keeps telling me that she's going to give some of it back if she doesn't spend it all on food. 'i cannot charge you rent!' she says, her arms open and palms facing out in the incredulous gesture of 'i am confused, and can't do anything about the aforementioned situation' -- you know the one.
It's almost as though she feels safer being taken advantage of and for granted. It's possible that the bigger mess I make, the more picky I am about food, the less thankful I am for her herculean housekeeping efforts, and the less money I give her, the happier she'll be about the situation. In fact, I'm almost certain of it. But, I can't do that.
I have to go to my shitty job tomorrow at 3pm. It's insulting that I'm working at exactly the same job I was when I was 16 -- my first job, at hardees: a cashier. Doubly insulting is that I'm $16K in debt for my education at umbc, a school that's known for it's pre-professional bent.
You know, I really do try. I'm trying to pay back my loans, even though I could default without any serious consequences. I keep trying to work, even though time and time again it hasn't been successful. I keep on living my life, even though it's been, off and on, more or less a miserable, unhappy failure since I turned 10. I just keep trucking along, blindly, foolishly, with no goal in mind, living out my remaining years without a living wage, independence, companionship, or joy.
I can really depress myself when I want to. It's sort of fun, in a way. But seriously, living with hanna while earning pittance at 'the art store' is a (very?) temporary situation, and I should think about the future in a more concrete way.
I'm a prime candidate for homelessness: I'm an only child who has employability problems, as well as a mental illness that would become totally debilitating if I were to stop taking my medication, which might happen some day (my mom currently pays my health insurance). Let me rephrase: a prime candidate for homelessness and/or jail -- I'm more or less a psychopath without this medication, and I'm not sure what I'd be capable of doing.
So, it's all sort of scary. There are a lot of unknowns and potential pitfalls.
The last blog-page was becoming truly enormous.
I just saw Star Wars -- it was good. I let out a giggle every once and a while, such as when samuel l. Jackson made a particularly humorous face. There were some other times, too, but I can't remember what they were. I should have been taking notes.
My favorite character was definitely 'general grievous' (haha), who was a head and a few chest-organs encased in a huge, hunched-over, scary-looking robot body. Most definitely very cool. He had a jamaican accent, much like jar-jar binks's, except that general grievous's (haha) sounded more like a drug-lord than a happy-go-lucky street-peddler.
I also enjoy the various darths: darth sidious, darth maul, darth plagueis, and darth vader. Here are some other darths:
darth atrocious
darth appalling
darth hideous
darth boff
darth ass
darth puke
Oh, and I left my bike-seat on the ground outside the box office. Someone turned it in, though, and I retrieved it after the movie.
I've been having dreams about girls. Not sex dreams -- if I do have those (maybe once every two years), they're ABOUT sex, not about having sex, if that makes any sense. My sex dreams explain to my conscious mind how I think and feel about sexually relating to another person (it's introspective and difficult), and are not sexually exciting dreams; there's no dreamed physical sensation whatsoever, if that's what you bunch of simians experience when you have these dreams. I've never had one of those -- they sound stupid.
At any rate, my girl-dreams have all been about women who don't like me: a chat-based girl on whom I used to have an electronic crush [1], boob-girl at the art supply store, and my ex-girlfriend lauren. In all of the cases, the primary theme has been that these girls were actually being nice to me, accepting me, talking to me, and listening to me. This is what I want from women, along with facial beauty and a slim figure (there's a classic archetype of the fat, greasy man wearing a too-tight 'NO FAT CHICKS' t-shirt -- I embrace it).
Googling my blog for mentions of helen, elaine, lauren, marisa, tara and ana, and then having a frequency-contest, would be fun. I think I'll do that now (girlfriends are listed in chronological order).
helen: 5
lauren: 2
marisa: 0
tara: 0
ana: 23
serena: 7
I include serena because I thought of her in a girlfriend-way, off and on, for many years while we had a very close 'relationship', although she didn't reciprocate. I broke up with serena on march 19th, 2005. See intellectualwhores.com for further details.
Ana's huge winning margin can be partly attributed to my dating her after I began blogging. The frequency-contest doesn't include multiple mentions of a girlfriend on the same page. This is good, since 99% of the time these are all part of the same incident.
I had the dream about lauren last night. she was prettier in my dream than she was when we were together (even though she was, objectively, the prettiest girl I've dated, even though she was a cold fish), and we were talking. Then, I told her how beautiful she was and we started kissing. But it wasn't sexual kissing -- it was more relational kissing -- I was getting to know lauren in a way that I never had the chance to. I suppose there's something to that victorian euphemism, 'to know someone'. 'carnal knowledge', which is arguably still in use, replaced it a bit more descriptively.
Lauren isn't interested in me now, in any way. I emailed her a few times and even called her while stoned in new york city. She didn't reply, and refused to talk on the phone. If a girl doesn't want me, I want her. I'm not sure if the opposite is true; probably, but not to the extent.
Sometimes I think I might want to start 'dating' again (I've never acquired girls by conventional means -- the closest was marisa), but then i remember what a huge pain in the ass girlfriends are; relationships aren't easy, but supposedly the benefits outweigh the hardship. I guess this is true for some relationships. There's the birthday, valentines day, christmas, anniversary and tooth-and-nail fighting -- just a huge pain in the ass. Obviously, I've broken up with every girlfriend I've had; operant conditioning at work.
Furthermore, I have a low dating commodity-value -- principally because I am unwealthy and unattractive. If the related behaviors were improved (eating less and exercising as well as desperately scrambling for a salaried job), I'd stand a much better chance of acquiring a high-end girlfriend, so to speak. The girlfriends I had later in my life were either too young or too fucked up (tara) to know better than to date a loser, for which their mothers would undoubtably (and did) admonish them.
My dreams reveal that I'd like to relate to women better, which might be possible if I didn't despise them so much. Many issues, much counter-productive [2] behavior.
[1] is this crazily rule-abiding grammar? Like saying 'for whom did you vote?' as opposed to the normal 'who did you vote for?' I actually heard someone say the former once. I couldn't stifle a giggle.
[2] define 'counter-productive'.