Haha, I torture you with irregular blogging.
I just re-painted the parking lines on my street. I hope I didn't somehow violate the delicate politics of residential developments, where the properties are so dangerously close together. The people in my neighborhood have been pretty nice, actually, except for this midget redneck who used to rent a room from my old neighbor richard, a gay man who rejected gay culture, something I unabashedly admire. Richard himself could be bitchy at times, however.
As far as neighbors go, I'm usually quite friendly unless I'm in a bad mood, but sometimes I lower home values in my row via property neglect, and emergency vehicles tend to come to my house. But lately, both flaws have improved. I still do somewhat unacceptable things like have a beer with a friend on the front steps, "victimless crimes," if you will, which really don't threaten anything save nonsense mores.
Anyway, this little napoleonic redneck drove an extended-bed, black pickup truck (can you say "compensation"?), which was bad enough, but he was also despicable in other ways.
Once, when I was trying to study, he was blaring his garth brooks or randy travis or whatever with richard's back door open. I went over there and asked that he turn his music down, and he was downright rude. After I stood there for a second, he said "goodbye", not as a farewell, but, the tone being crystal clear, as a "get the fuck out of my backyard."
Another midget redneck anecdote: when my mom asked him to stop something or another, he sarcastically dropped to his knees (short trip, tee-hee) and mock-pleaded forgiveness. I feel like I should have killed him, but I realized, after reading some essays and stories by inmates in prison, that my number-one priority in life is not to go to there.
So, I'm going to practice saying such hurtful things to people that they develop severe depression and kill themselves. Think "hannibal lechter" in "silence of the lambs," where he talks to that guy in the adjacent cell and causes him to swallow his own tongue. Good stuff.
My mom isn't immune to these sort of neighbor-problems, but she had her own rather ingenious way of dealing with them.
When the neighbors would tick her off, she'd go to the grocery store and pick up a plastic box full of those really, really hideous sugar cookies with about an inch of garrishly-colored frosting arranged into a smiley face with huge eyelashes or something, and leave it on the offending party's doorstep, with the intention of making them subtly uncomfortable. "i think it's time for ugly cookies," she'd say. Genius.
Long, long ago, there was this sow of a woman who lived with richard. She didn't like something we did (i don't remember what), and as revenge she shoveled the snow from her walk all over our walk. I think I called her a "fucking redneck."
This is my generic insult to white people -- I think I'm statistically likely to be right on the mark. After all, everyone is a redneck compared to someone, or can call someone a redneck, except maybe the queen of england and that birth-defected banjo-boy in "deliverance," respectively.
That was the worst of it, by far. Actually, I can't say that neighbor-spite was an issue ever again, except for a few dirty looks and insinuations. For instance, after I cut down all of the bamboo, I got a lovely thanks from the woman across the way, which included "we had to look at that every day!" she was on her way to church on a Tuesday afternoon, and wore pancake makeup. I named her "tammy faye."
She mentioned she had been in the neighborhood for 30 years, and when I told her we'd been here since '87, she gave an unmistakable look of abject, shocked horror, and couldn't manage any other words. My professor gave me one of these when I came and visited him after two years -- they're fun to see. Don't get me started on my professors.
I think maybe she was freaked out because she realized we'd been in this house throughout the various emergency vehicle arrivals, and years-long property-neglect. Or, I might have imagined the whole thing. Who knows. No-one can fathom the mind of tammy faye except tammy faye.
The current neigbors are quite easy-going (excepting some dirty looks from the wife, when I woke her up a couple of times by banging on her door to bring up bamboo-related issues).
I'm still mildly afraid that the re-painting of the parking marker lines is going to be taken as some kind of afront, either because I'm painting community property (i asked the homeowner's association first), it might imply things about others' parking skills (it was done principally with my mom in mind, and because the lines had literally become invisible), or because I didn't do a good enough job (i thought it was pretty good, except I didn't scrub the asphalt as clean as I could have beforehand), or that I didn't paint all of the lines (i just painted the ones you couldn't see, and that were close to my house).
I didn't scrub the ground anywhere near well enough, come to think of it. But if the paint fades, I can just re-apply later, preceded by more thorough preperatory measures. I'm just hoping it doesn't smudge. Man, neighbors are a real bitch.
I hate politics, which really amounts to "pretending to be nice to everyone so they won't be mean to you." I think that's a useful definition. Or, alternatively, "sucking up so as to garner favors (such as votes, or just freedom from dirty looks)."
Long gone are the days when neighbors were some kind of friendly blessing (think "little house on the prarie"), and you went over to their houses for dinner, and blah blah. Now, it's all-out war to claim territorial pissing ground on community property. The problem is that we all live so damned close together, and are still stuck in american frontier great plains "what's mine is mine" mode. Contrast with japan.
Well, maybe not that bad. But pretty close -- there's an ongoing hubbub and stir in my neighborhood about parking, and this committee or that committee is always sending two-man expeditions from door to door, offering up petitions. I hear there was also some ruckus about a junky truck being parked -- basically, anything that doesn't look like it's out of "better homes and gardens" gets condemned by tammy faye and her representatives..
I think there's a bit of class warefare going on, actually. On the one hand, you have people like tammy faye, who are pretty solidly upper-middle class white american and get uncomfortable when ne'er do wells such as myself, with my shaven head and tendency to go out and get things in my car while wearing my underwear, move into their pristine america. On the other hand, you have kids here who drink in their backyards, chattering loudly in spanish, and other residents who grow pot on their property. So, I'm by no means the worst of it.
When richard was next-door, I invented a seemingly offensive joke (i only tried it out on one person, who thought it very clever) that's really not offensive, if you think about it. You know how I always complain about the city-suburb model, and how everyone in gaithersburg claims to "live in DC," and proper DC residents are disdainful of suburban cultureless scum?
Well, I can rightfully claim to live in DC -- I'm (when I made up the joke) surrounded by african americans and gay men, and there's no parking. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. You know you like it.
So anyway, I hope my line-painting doesn't cause problems in some subtle way. I think I'm just being paranoid, and it'll be seen as a helpful thing. Right now, I'm violating my own painted markers, just because I painted them after my car was parked. I should go re-park it, to set an example of virtuousness for the community.
It appears to some that the homeowner's association here are a bunch of nazis. They do walk-throughs periodically, and note houses that are by their standards delapidated, and send notices to the owners. If the owners don't make necessary renovations within some time period (a month?), the association can have it done, and charge the owner. If the owner doesn't pay, the association can evict the owner (!). Maybe this has never happened, or has happened like once in 50 years.
But it really is a beautiful neighborhood, in part kept that way by nazi arcitechtural committees and such, and if forced to live in a townhouse development, the wall of my house stickily and sweatily touching the walls of my neighbors' in blatant violations of American Personal Space, then I'd choose to live here. Of course I'd rather be on a ranch in the yukon territory, holding a hunting rifle-with-scope, my 50 acres surrounded by razor wire and a perimeter alarm, but we can't have everything.
Even though my neighborhood is lovely, the homeowner association's website is not -- I was asked to revamp and maintain it gratis, which is just nonsense. I already do one site for free. That's the problem with arty things, or design things -- people don't see the work involved. They just assume that the "artist" loves to create, and that s/he'll do it for free, and that it's not a big deal.
I can see my server icon blinking away. I wonder which hungry reader it is? Blog-readers and google-searchers constitute 80% or so of my hits. Once and a while, I'll get something weird, like this person in japan who basically went through every single written piece I've posted. And no, it wasn't a bot; it was over something like an hour and a half.
Along with concrete marker paint, I got a leaf-blower. I can't be raking my lawn, since it's covered with delicate little plants. Soon I blow leaves -- but I wait until paint has dried, lest blown leaves blow onto it and stick to it. Townhouses suck.
I keep trying to write, but I'm listening to space music and it's putting me into a trance. Also, I'm having this problem that I sometimes get when it's late and I lean back from the monitor, and my field of vision starts to jerk rapidly from side to side. Something to do with eye-tracking and monitor-flicker.
A tremor of the eyeball, maybe. I know that I have tremors of the eyelid, and sometimes can't keep them properly closed -- they just stutter their way open when I'm bedding down. Very annoying.
I keep e-stalking xgf#4. Periodically, I google her, just to see if anything new has come up. A while back I found her hometown on the web, and got her number from national directory assistance. I called her up while in new york city visiting tom.
I think she said "i gotta go" after about five minutes -- she was as noticably unconfortable as you might have expected her to be, especially considering how creepily eccentric I can come across as being, even though I am of course not, in any way, ever, and am pleasantville-calibre normal.
That incident took place during a long weekend with tom and peter, which was totally surreal inasmuch as we spent 72 continuous hours peakedly high on reefer.
This was a long time ago, and I don't do that sort of thing now (seriously!). So, I feel that I can write about it now, with impunity. The thing is, when I remember that weekend, it doesn't strike me as being all tha strange a vacation. We went to museums, restaurants, a few shops, and a couple of parties. We hung around in tom's apartment listening to music. It was typical, but at the time it seemed utterly surreal.
Anyway, the whole point of mentioning that trip was that I phoned lauren sometime during it. And recently, I've been googling her again -- sucking the pipe, as it were. Now, she's even in google's white pages, which really makes all issues of "stalking" moot -- her contact info is right there in the "real" public record.
However, her email address isn't mentioned, which presented a nice opportunity. I tried to extrapolate it from the school she's likely attending and her likely username, but to no avail ("user unknown"). I do, however, have her old email address. It's nice to have this tremendous store of data in which one can search for strings of text.
Searching for "lauren" on my hard drive, I pulled along with her old email address (which I may or may not test) a paragraph out of an email describing that new york trip. It was mostly an unremarkable email, but the paragraph describing the lauren incident was funny:
oh yeah, and I called lauren. She was all freaked out, and a few hours later I got a strange email from phil tamulonis. Oh yeah, and also on that same night (the night I went to bed at 6:30) I went nuts on tom's computer with my email. I sent messages to you, phil tamulonis, all of my instant messenger buddies, google's hr department, some international research company, and I offered my help in secret code to the information technology department at umbc. I also wrote a diet book, and woke Peter and tom up at around 5am to make them promise they wouldn't steal my diet book idea. actually, that is one of the *strangest* things I have ever written. I can forward it to you if you want.
This "diet book" used to be posted in an early manifestation of my writing section, but I determined it to be too stupid and took it down. Yeah, it was strange, but really not very interesting.
Here's what I'm trying to get to: why have I devoted, over the years, so much mental energy to obsessing about and over lauren? If you put her together with serena, this little indian girl named "angelina" on whom I had a crush in 3rd grade, and a dull italian girl from the town of "king of prussia" (weird, eh?) named "gab," whom I met at st. Mary's college of Maryland, we have accounted for a pretty decent chunk of my brain's electro-chemical activity over the years.
A lot of it is pure looks, which is bizarre. Why would I obsess over someone because of the way they look, on their bone structure and fat-distribution (and skin, and hair, and other stuff)?
I often write about just how base the human race is, and how our mating behavior is determined by secondary sex characteristics, like a bunch of peacocks or cockroaches, but it still shocks me somewhat to remember that I had NO other excuse for my crush on gab, besides her big, brown eyes. None whatsoever. She was pretty. That's it. She wasn't smart, interesting, funny, talented, etc -- she was utterly plain and boring. Wholey unremarkale. But, she was intoxicating.
I can say "ah yes...those facial characteristics that made her appealing were indicative of fertility, etc etc." and maybe this is true -- maybe (clearly?) there was something going on there on a deep-rooted physiological level. What would have happened had I gotten gab, and had married her? At what point would my starry-eyed crush have faded? After menopause? Would I have realized that there just wasn't much there, besides big brown eyes, a smile and ivory skin?
It's a little distressing that a crush based solely on appearance can motivate someone to pledge their life to someone else. Actually, I think here's what happens: we find each other based on good looks, and then we get to talking, and discover that we're "perfect for each other," even though any one of 6,999,999,998 others would have been just as "perfect," after two personalities have a chance to mesh and mould each other over the months. This is not to mention the intense psychological bonds that rise up out of sexual relations.
"love" is an ongoing process of openness, caring, patience and communication used to build a relationship over time. "love" isn't like a drug -- lust and beauty are. "SEX" is the crack-pipe here, and nothing else. Doubly confusing is that for me, the feeling of having a crush on someone doesn't feel sexual. It's more just a deep-seated feeling of WANTING someone. I remember I'd always draw pictures of the girls I'd get crushes on, and just think about them and how in love I was with the idea of them.
So, I can say "yes, falling in love is nonsense, it's all about sexual urges triggered by fertility-indicating physical characteristics," and I can even believe it (which I do). But it sure didn't feel that way; it felt like art. But it's so obviously laughable to fall in love with people like gab -- with people who are so clearly unsatisfactory companions, and who wouldn't interest me at all if they weren't so nice looking.
It's frustrating that something we hold so sacred, our minds and desires, are nothing more than chemical reactions. Of course it's also truism, and beating a dead horse -- this particular brand of cynicism-slash-realism is old-hat, but I digress.
There's nothing mysterious or magical or spiritual about falling in love -- it's not two souls merging or anything like that. I don't believe in any unknowable unknowns, and I don't believe in the supernatural. Barring my weird crackpot theory on quantum consciousness, I'm a pretty rational guy.
ok, in a nutshell: physical quanta being self-directing entities implies that the whole of being is one big self-directing entity. What we experience as consciousness and free will is simply this same self-direction, and the entire universe is equated with each of our minds, from each of our points of view. This has strange implications for death and suicide, but I don't want to make this paragraph longer than it is already.
Ok, so anyway. Gab is the easiest to explain away, because she had no redeeming (or "attractive") qualities other than being pretty. Ergo, I was drawn to her only because of the way she looked. Ergo, it was some sort of visceral body thing -- maybe we would have been 99.8% likely to have produced defect-free children or something. Who knows. But, at least gab is theoretically easy to explain away with hormonal and gamete-related mechanics.
Lauren is a little tougher, and she's the one I've been wanting to talk about. Partly it was the way she looked, but she wasn't so pretty that I would have gone for her had she been a drooling imbecile. Her appearance was a factor; I'm not going to develop a crush on a plain girl, no matter how interesting or smart they are. If they're that wonderful, I'd welcome their friendship and companionship, but there's just no way that closeness would ever resolve in a romantic way -- there's no way I'd fall in love with them.
These were serena's issues with me -- she simply wasn't attracted to me, but enjoyed my "friendship." it's unfortunate that these things happen, but it's the oldest story in the world (or one of them).
She clung to the fantasy that someday I'd stop being attracted to her, and I clung to the fantasy that she'd some day become attracted to me. Friendships between unrequited lovers can theoretically work, if the one who loves is willing to endure that terrible loss, and trade up for incomplete closeness. But this happens something like one out of a million times -- those relationships usually fail.
I guess I liked lauren because she was smart, quirky, artsy, pretty, shy and unaccessible emotionally or physically. It doesn't help me now that she's doing interesting, creative, intelligent and ambitious things with her life (ph33r my 1337 e-stalking powers, which consist of googling "firstname lastname"). There is for me an element to a crush of wanting to BE the person in question, and not just be with them. I dunno. I'm weird.
But I'm old enough and practical enough now to realize that this is just a (now fading...thanks, cathartic writing!) crush, and the reality of a relationship would be very different. I tend to think of the reality as this couple sitting on the couch, staring at the television set, with expressionless faces, and not some poofy-cloud pipe dream of staring instead into each others' eyes. Reality is somewhere in between, as always; one eye on the TV set, and the other eye on the eye of your lover.
I'm thinking of going on a ten day meditation retreat in January with tom's little brother. I probably will.
The warning linked on the archive index page is stupid, self-indulgent, and unfriendly. Plus, people are going to do what they want anyway. So, I've taken it down.
Tonight is movie night! I'm going with my mom to watch a movie, eat, drink and perhaps talk to people at a gathering in rockville. These are her co-workers, but they're closer to my age. They probably all read my blog. The whole world reads my blog.
What I need to do is write about really shameless banalities for a week, like what I had for breakfast or something. But I DO do that -- maybe blogs are just interesting.
But probably not, eh? People hate them. They really do. I don't hate them -- I don't really care. The flow of information on the internet that is supposedly being clogged and polluted by bloggers was never top-rate to begin with; it's not like these 14 year-old kids are citing their sources.
I know that when I've written wikipedia articles, I don't go berserk, fact-checking; I'm certain most others don't, either. Furthermore, I think wikipedia is the height of "good" free information on the web; it gets a hell of a lot worse.
Shit, I don't know. So many people are getting the language content of their brains from the web that at this point it's moot to consider it "bad" information. The web has essentially helped re-define reality as subjective, which, although it might be true, is also probably a bad way of looking at things.
The problem with relativism is that nothing gets done.
I feel guilty about not working. I think I need to do some physical job -- I seem to enjoy that kind of work. I say "seem to" because I am basically the least self-aware person in the world, and don't have a realistic grasp of what's good for me, what's bad for me, what I can do, and what I cannot do. Even what I enjoy and don't enjoy is largely a mystery.
I'm pretty sure I enjoy pulling out bamboo, tee-hee. You know, ever time I include something like "tee-hee" in my writing here, I think of the very first entry I made, something like two years ago...OH MY GOD I FORGOT MY BLOG'S 2ND BIRTHDAY! How awful. Here's a belated birthday cake -- sorry, blog.
Nine days late. Pretty bad. Sorry the candles are so oddly-placed -- I put the first one in right smack-dab in the middle of the cake.
So anyway, that bit of my first entry two years ago, posted on October 20th, 2003, of which I'm reminded every time I transcribe a noise like "tee-hee":
maybe a good exercise would be to avoid smiley faces, noises like 'hmmm' and 'arrgh,' and I guess stream-of-consciousness rambling in general. Also, I'm going to try not to use '...' to avoid punctuating anything thoughtfully.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...interesting :-)
