Never been one to let the carrier drop

Okay, so I agreed to come and be wooed by a potential employer in SoCal, and they put me up at the Radisson in Newport Beach, for a price that I won’t quote because it’s too horrific. This hotel seems to be very good at looking ostentatious, but has some serious problems with the details of being a good hotel.

My first complaint: All hotels which cost more than $120 a night shalt have fluffy towels. Their towels remind me of motel 6 towels – entirely too thin and small to dry off a entire person with.

My second complaint: despite the fact that I was clearly assigned a king size bed, they originally tried to pawn off two very small queens on me.

My third complaint: The laundry vending machines that sell dryer sheets and whatnot are mislabeled, making actually buying the correct laundry product difficult. The staff are very hesitent to refund money and mostly claim that this inadequacy is ‘somebody else’s problem’.

My fourth complaint: (and I admit, this may be petty) Room service closes at 10:30. Calling at 10:28 by the cell network, which I think gets time from the atomic clock, will result in them telling you they are closed.

My fifth complaint: There are no snack machines.

My sixth complaint: There is one microwave in the entire hotel.

My seventh complaint: None of the hotel entrances have access card readers, and they’re all locked at night, allowing access only through the front entrance.

My eighth complaint: Only a very few rooms have refrigerators, and no minibars either. 😉

My ninth complaint: The TVs are really small.

My tenth complaint: The hotel keys have ‘sleep number bed’ proudly emblazoned on them, but neither of the rooms we were in actually had sleep number beds.

My eleventh complaint: The wifi must be renewed every day, and for all I know they’re tracking my MAC address – certainly they ask for my name every day. They threaten to charge in the lobby, with placards such as ‘applicable charges may apply’

My twelfth complaint: The tubs are tiny – they’re not deep enough to immerse my head in, and they’re not long enough to stretch out in, and in general they’re just too small in all ways.

Aren’t you glad you have me on your friends list? Didn’t you really need to know all this?

Okay, sorry..
S.

In another hour, I’ll be 30. Actually, as Kayti points out, where I was born, I’m already 30. I’m not sure how I feel about this – I keep waiting to suddenly turn republican, but so far it hasn’t happened. I’m not sure what I have turned instead..

Depressed.

Why do I obsess on religion and hate it so much? I’m so sick of feeling this way..

I left the real world a while ago. It was rather pleasent. I just stopped reading the newspapers, stopped watching the television news, and figured they can all go to hell in a handbasket however they like. So far the kind men at the power company have kept the power on, and my friends at Blarg have kept the network connection up. Oil prices seem to be climbing but as long as I can get enough solar panels to keep my computers running when the power company starts charging twice as much a kwh, I should be okay.

Or will I? I’ve had thoughts that bordered on the darkest insanity I know.. this repeated anger that I was created without my permission and then forced to live in a world that requires me to eat and subjects me to miserable conditions unless I work – basically enslave myself to other people and other people’s priorities.

It’s frustrating. I want to build electric vehicles and write music. (and probably fiction, and probably fingerpaint for all of that). Now that I understand that all you have to do to be omnipotent is be a number line, my patience with this situation is waning, to put it mildly.

Did I ask to be created? I can’t remember it if I did – but it wouldn’t astonish me to discover that I in fact somewhere back in the depths of time thought that being a human would be a lot of fun. And yes, it’s definately had it’s high points.

But I’m not looking forward to the slow decay of years, and I’ve had enough pain already, thank you very much, I really don’t need more.

I went to a bipolar support group meeting today. If nothing else, it’s reassuring to note that I’m not the only frustrated one, nor the only one who thinks I’m stuck inside a system that often makes no sense at all or is counterproductive.

ClueTrain

I lack enough power to make it through the flight. I did get a chance to (via my cell phone) get the address of the hotel, so there’s nothing critical not happening.

I can’t keep track of what day it is. I think 27.

My life has been exhausting lately. I keep hoping things will settle down to a more managable pace, but as of yet it hasn’t happened.

Met with my lawyer today. Well, not really my lawyer because he’s leaving the firm in a week. But he took my information, radiated general legal competence, and I have high hopes for this firm actually figuring out a solution to my legal woes. Or at least, I can hope.

I’ve figured out why my dad saying the universe doesn’t owe me a living angers me: I didn’t ask to be created, and I am not permitted [or at least strongly discouraged] from ceasing to exist. Given that these things are true, it would seem that the universe does indeed owe me a living. And he is directly responsable for that.

I keep wondering.. in some previous life, prior to now, did I ask to be here, to watch friend after friend die, to experience system after system of my body failing, to experience pain and loss and suffering? Is it ever moral to have children, given the dark sides of the world that we are bringing them into? Is it moral to expect our children to work, given that they didn’t ask to exist? To ask them to give up their dreams in order to work on projects they don’t care about or even actively dislike? (i.e. parking meters – if I could make every parking meter in the world dissapear by waving a magic wand, I’d start waving. Actually, that probably applies to every form of currency as well. I’m not against money as a basic concept for energy exchange, but I am getting awfully sick of some of the fruits of capitolism as it’s currently implimented. Starting out with, why do all of the professionals I’m seeing, who don’t actually have any more hours of training than I do, get paid more than I do? In the meantime, why does my friend Tory, who’s every bit as worthwhile as a human, get paid less? It’s sick, people, and it needs to be put out of it’s misery. Especially in the case of CEOs who draw millions of dollars of pay.)

My basic choice was either stay under parents who tried to apply the morals their religion specified on me, despite the fact that I rejected that religion – or get out and work, at that time for $2/hr. I chose, obviously, to get out and work. But I find that on some level I harbor some anger for the whole situation.

I feel kind of like humans are intrensically selfish. Having children, for example, is a selfish act – most of the time you want them to conform to your ideals of what a ideal human is, which leads to many fights between parents and children. I don’t think that parents should have any authority over children. But then, I reject all authority in general unless it is operating in a advisary capacity. You all may have the might to throw me in jail, beat me, kill me, deprive me of my possessions, or in general make my life miserable. That doesn’t mean that it is right to do any of those things, any more than it would be right for me to do them to any of you. This would seem self-evident.

If I could destroy every government on earth without hurting any of the humans that are the component parts of those governments, I would probably do that also.

Can you tell I’m in a bad mood today?

Every government should come with a built in mechanism by which the governed can request a re-authoring or update of the government and governing documents. THis isn’t saying that any of the people involved in the government should be hurt, although in many cases they should be removed from power. However, every government suffers from some basic weaknesses. Any time one human attempts to order another human about, bad things are going to happen.

I can’t decide if I’m green, liberetarian, or anarchist. I have a little bit of each in me – for example, I don’t think it is correct for me to take actions which poisen the enviornment that we all have to live in, or use up resources wantonly that our children and their children and their children will need. But in terms of drug laws, and ‘blue code’ laws, and laws concerning who can and can’t marry, and things like that, I’m strongly anarchist. You shouldn’t be able to tell me I can’t marry someone that is the same gender that I am, marry multiple people, or marry my dog, cat, or dolphin. And you should be ashamed of yourself for trying, those of you out there who support such insanity.

I’ve been thinking of a project – a web site that allowed members of the internet community at large to vote on passages from the bible. Basically, the idea is, there is some good content there. However, there’s a lot of passages that I could, honestly, do without reading. There’s a lot of darkness, negativity, genocide, etc. I want to see a book that contains reasonable advice for life, ajusted for modern technology (birth control, condoms, etc) and cutting out all sexism, agism, genderism, sexual-orientation-ism, and in general all of the text that offends my egalitarian beliefs. I’m not demanding that anyone read this tome, but I think it would be neat to have a community resource that enabled it to be authored.

One possibility I’ve thought of is dumping the bible into a wiki, and then publishing the location via google and sitting back to watch the fun. But I’m not sure that this would achive what I’m trying to achive, so somewhat better tuned software might be in order.

I admit, it’s not a huge priority. But I wish *someone* would do it.

Okay, that’s enough of my bad attitude for the moment.

Actually, one more comment. I seem to have different opinions on some subjects every day. So all of the above text is subject to change without notice, at least in terms of my attitudes about the world.

I saw a momentary glitch a while ago in which a clerk at a checkout stand had like eight fingers on the hand that was operating the cash register instead of five.

Creepy stuff. Not that I’m discriminating against entities with eight fingers per hand..

Ow my aching back. Today is another back-hurts day. Had nightmares all last night.. in one, I was trying to get through a tunnel and there was broken glass everywhere and it was embedding in my skin. In others, other horrible things happening.. in general, it was not a good night. I also kept Kayti up with my tossing and turning, which is pretty horrible.

But, it’s day 25. Halfway to my high water mark, still doing fine. I was put in temptation’s way, in terms of having a cig, last night and managed to resist. I don’t know that I’ve given up cigs forever, but I’m pretty clear on them being among the things that I’m not touching this (year – 25 days). And really, I haven’t been smoking any to speak of for a couple of years now.

One year still seems just as long as it did when I started this adventure, but at least I’ve got lots of stuff to keep me busy.

Sometimes I wish I was a little less busy, but I will survive

Day 22. Naturally it would have to happen that Gateway would crash while I’m out of town. I’ve asked my friend Tory to reboot it, and hopefully he will.

Yesterday was a awful day on all fronts. Woke up at 10:00a, went down to the clients site, wrote a disaster recovery plan, and pulled a first-year-sysadmin stupidity stunt.

I was using text mode on a linux console and switching back and forth between about four consoles. I forgot that one of the consoles had been sshed to another host, and when a process hung because of some incorrect settings, I did a killall – on the wrong machine. Unfortunately, the process was a dependancy for the production services run on that machine, and so they went down, leaving 300 people without their database. All of whom were in the same building I was.

We restarted the database (took about 10 minutes) and ostensibly no data was lost. But I still feel awful. THe boss didn’t even yell at me – just said ‘you know what you did..’

Then more awful things happened..

Day 21 begins. I’m at the customer’s site. No one else is here yet. I think this is the first time I’ve ever been the first one into the office. Yay for drugs.

(For those of you who haven’t been following, my psychiatric nurse, who I’ve been seeing for a bit under a month, hath prescribed me a sleeping pill, Lunestra, which allows me to correct for when my clock slips against the sun. This has been a bit of a relevation in my life because historically, there have been times of every month in which I’m unable to wake up before 1p, then 2p, then 3p, etc. When I was younger, I just had to stay up until 4a and sleep until 1p or so because that’s the only cycle that my body would hold at all. Now, with the help of a little coffee on the hard days, I seem to be able to hold any cycle I want. I’m not even sure what to do with this yet, but it does make waking up at 10a a whole lot easier.