mind boggling

its times like these, when everything is being torn down around you, that you have a sense that something might happen to just push you over the edge. you have been living your life, waiting for things to happen, waiting for things to get better, and being an optimistic person, expecting things to get better. but then, time after time, things start to get worse. first its the little things, then its more things, and eventually, everything that you thought was going to get better gets worse and worse and worse. i mean, even in roulette, if you consistently bet on black every time, eventually you will win. right now, i feel like i’ve been betting on black for three years straight, and its been consistently, mathematically impossibly, still coming up red. this is how it feels. the feeling makes you start to question things. things in your life that you thought were solid become ephemeral. other things which were ephemeral become more real.

you start to question the solid foundation you had on life. a conservative is a liberal mugged, some say. and its hard to maintain your solidity in the face of multiple body blows. you think, why am i standing here taking this abuse when it would be so much easier to just comply. just stop fighting it. just let life wash over you. just let it do its thing.

you believe that all of your life that you can control your life and your self. that the decisions that you make in your life are your own and you are responsible for what happens to you. what if however, you begin to doubt that? what if, one day, you wake up and say. “damn. i am so tired of fighting. maybe if i just lay down and let life take me away, let myself be the leaf in the stream, life would be so much better. i won’t have to fight anymore. just stop.”

but then you come to your senses. life is not like that. humanity is not like that. life is a struggle. it HAS to be a struggle. you can’t live your life by releasing control of your life. no matter who says that they are there to help, and that they will take on your burdens, those burdens are not theirs to take. those burdens are your and yours alone. is it part of being human, the constant struggle to survive. we woudl not be human without it. God, government, whoever. You, and you alone, are responsible for your own life, liberty and happiness. You and you alone have to survive in thie world, and you have to do it from your own toil. Taking from others is not an option. You must support yourself.

negative option

an essential tool for getting people to actually piss or get off the pot, i first learned about the magic of negative option when i worked for a cable company what feels like a million years ago. its like this – you send a note to people saying “we are going to move you into a more expensive package. if you don’t want this to happen, tell us before we do it in 30 days”. most people, being lazy, either ignore or forget this, and they get pushed up into the higher package automatically. sneaky and underhanded for doing something about charging people for money but brilliant for getting people to actually get off their asses and DO stuff. its an essential tool for any project or people manager “if i don’t hear from you before X, i will go ahead and do Y”. if you give people enough time to respond, they usually do, since they usually don’t want the other option to go ahead. so it works almost every time. a good tool to use in your life.

only if it reflects badly on me will i do it

you know, some people will only leap into action when whatever they are failing to leap into action on will reflect badly on them. who cares if the thing you are trying to get them to do will actually help other people, including their own children? they will stall and stall and stall, unless it either makes them look good at first – at which point they will do something immediately, until the last possible moment. as soon as they realize they will look bad if they don’t do something, then they do it. i think they get a charge out of thinking that they are instrumental in doing this thing, even though everyone around them had to scramble and bend over backwards in order to get them to do this thing. they enjoy watching people dance for their pleasure. again, these people are one of the problems with humanity.

the dig

there are people, who can’t communicate in any way shape or form, without insulting you. they insert dig after dig after dig in their communications. some are subtle, and some are more obvious. they thrive on pointing out how even though they were at fault, they will swear up and down that they weren’t and that you were, even when it is a blatant obvious fact that you weren’t. they can easily use neutral language to describe something, but they specifically choose their words simply to hurt. they rejoice in the pain of others. they feel a sense of accomplishment in verbally poking someone in the ribs repeatedly and laughing about it. they secretly smile to themselves, thinking “ooh I got him good”, when it reality it just shows how stupid and small minded they are. they can’t communicate clearly, openly and honestly, ever. everything they say, everything they do, every move has to hurt someone else, because only then do they feel joy. its a pretty sad existence actually, always looking to hurt people in order to uplift themselves. they see life as a zero sum game. they don’t win, unless someone else loses. and they can’t just come out and just diss someone, they don’t have the courage to do that. they don’t have the courage to confront their own issues with people. so they have to make these subtle digs at people. over and over and over again. this is their only path to joy. not love, but hate. their path to joy is hate. if you ask me, they are one of the biggest problems with humanity.

no trip

sometime this week, i will probably have to tell my boys that i can’t take them to canada to visit their family this summer. this is purely due to their mother not trusting that i will bring the boys back to their home in california, and is asking for ridiculous and unreasonable requirements in order for her to condescend to allow my children to visit my side of their family for a week. this trip is for their benefit, not mine, but she is using this to punish me. its very sad when someone allows their own petty wants and feelings to affect their children’s lives in profound ways. you see it everywhere actually. the soccer mom chatting with her friends on her cellphone while her children are begging for her attention, or taking their kids to starbucks and letting them run riot while they chat with their friends. you can see these children, tagging along with the grownup- talking grown up things with other grown ups – these adults have a near disdain for anything but their own feelings, their own wants and needs. the children just tag along, an afterthought.

there is this scene in the movie ” a series of unfortunate events” where jim carrey, playing the evil uncle olaf, is talking to another adult, he turns to the kids and says “run along children, the adults are talking”

you see it everywhere. makes me ill. you think the kids don’t notice when you ignore them, or don’t hear what you are saying when you think that they are out of earshot. this kids notice all this. and when they are allowed to speak their mind, they will.

angry day

today is angry day. it is the day the amount of time my fiance and i are waiting for equals the average time it takes for this “phase” of the visa process. For us its been 124 days since we filed our petition. the average has probably gone up a bit to 126 days, but today is the day we set in our calendars which allows us to get extra pissed off at the whole process. not that we haven’t been pissed off at this whole process from the very beginning. for those of you not in the know, it takes a stupidly long time for the US government to process a fiance visa, and an even more stupidly long time to process a spousal visa.

picture this. you are a us citizen. you fall in love with a non-us citizen. if you decide to marry him/her, and want to go through the legal process of bringing your beloved into the country, it could take a year or more from the date you get engaged or the date you get married, to actually be reunited with your love.

why? because the US government doesn’t care about you. you are a us citizen, and therefore can be treated like shit. however if, you are an illegal immigrant, or a criminal alien as i like to call them, you are showered with free stuff, free money, free health care, and in the end, if john mccain or barack obama have their way, citizenship. thats right folks. us citizens sit in limbo for years, while criminal aliens get rewarded. this is the topsy-turvy world we live in.

why are citizens treated poorly while non-citizens get the benefits? well, its like something greeks like to do to each other – basically if you are dealing with another greek, they think its ok to screw you because “it’s ok, you’re greek” – that you’d be ok with shoddier service simply because we share a culture. so the us government likes to put up a friendly front for illegal immigrants, but to their owns citizens, they say screw you.

criminal aliens don’t have to wait. whole families cross the border. criminal aliens don’t have to be separated from their families. criminal aliens get to be together right away, and with most likely no repercussions.

so you think why don’t we do that too? cause i don’t believe in breaking the law. those of us who honor the law are punished, while those who break the law are rewarded. this is the world we are in.

so we suffer. we seethe. we get angry. but in the end, it doesn’t matter. some low paid government functionary holds 70,000 peoples lives a year in the balance, takes their time, doesn’t really care that the names on those petitions are living breathing people with lives who miss their loves desperately.

no one cares.

artofmanliness.com

an excellent blog about what i’ve talked about for a long time – we need to get back to a level of civility in our personal interactions which we seem to have lost. now we also need an artofwomanliness.com blog to help women be civil too.

bigwheels.net

this is where i bought the new wheels for my car. these guys rock, great price, great service. highly recommended.

university chicken

the bay area is great – no really i love it and would never want to ever live anywhere else – but i always have a tough time finding decent places for specific kinds of food. however this wing place rocks. if you just want wings, this place has 7 different heat levels – everything from mild to global thermo nuclear. plus they have fries and gravy – a canadian staple i really miss. even better they also have fries with cheese. and of course the piece de resistance – you can ask for both gravy and cheese on your fries and voila – a poor mans poutine – a quebecois delicacy beloved all over canada. it not quite real poutine – as real poutine uses cheese curds and not stright up cheese, its still the closest you can get in the bay area.

insanity

how can you tell when someone has lost their mind? how can you tell if someone is crazy? when they think thoughts that are completely out there? when they think someone that can never be a possibility can be a possibility? is someone crazy when they believe in aliens? or god? or other completely unbelievable things? is there an way to test people, without sending someone to a psychiatrist, to see if they are crazy? what we need is amicrazy.com or aretheycrazy.com. you go there, enter the particulars, then have the site determine your level, or someone else level of insanity. at least it would be a good pre-screening method prior to sending out the guys in white coats and butterfly nets.