“…you do have to be gay to admit that you want to make love to people who are of the same gender as you so stop it with the racketball classes and go eat up some of that genitalia that looks just like the kind that’s smack dab on the business end of your pelvis.”
From Girls Are Pretty
Should I have been more guarded? I said I had a good afternoon, and I did, and at the time that I posted it, I was definitely feeling good. But I have a funny way of remembering things.
I didn’t know it until recently that it was funny, but I’m told that it isn’t the ‘right’ way to remember things.
See, I look back on memories in light of everything that has occurred since, including my current mood and beliefs. Which means that if something was happening to me that made me happy and seemed good and inspired hope for further events like it to occur, or which made me increasingly happy because of the future happy events it seemed to imply, and since it occurred nothing like it has occurred and the implied future events have proven impossible, I don’t remember it as fondly. In the case of the recent good afternoon, the memory is only slightly diminished as my enthusiasm about that day has been met with something very near apathy and the afternoon put into a less hopeful, less … enthusiastic perspective.
I may not be stating myself fully. I’ll keep trying:
I believe that this phenomenon is largely related to my idealist nature. Boundless hope and the belief that utopia is achievable reside in me. I believe in true love and the possibility for joy that ‘happy endings’ represent. If I can be happy for one minute (and I can) then I can be happy for two. If I can be happy for two minutes, I can certainly be happy for four… and so on forever, right? If two people can make it work out for just one hour, then why not 1000 hours or 1,000,000 hours? The best IS possible, everything CAN work out. It is worth it to look forward to good times. I believe all of this to be true.
Which means that in any situation I tend to look forward to it getting better and better. If things are bad, they will get better. If things are good they will at the least continue and likely become amazing, transcendent, breathtaking and beautiful. How I feel about anything in the present is tied in this way to the expectation that it will only get better and better.
So when things don’t get better and better, when things get worse, or when things don’t happen at all, my view of how things will go gets adjusted. If my ideas about how things would get better were associated in any way with specific periods of time then when those times have passed, any hopes I had for them that went unfulfilled are removed, struck out, and the moments that were tied to that chance, that possibility for greatness that never occurred, are no longer tied to positive hopes. They are instead tied to dashed hopes and unfulfilled dreams. And now the memories that were so happy, so joyful, so hopeful, are tainted and sullied by reality. Brought into perspective and seen for what they were; good at the time, but not all that special.
Someone asked me a few weeks ago what my happiest memory was. I couldn’t think of one. I gave a couple of examples of what used to be happy thoughts, but that were now tainted in this was by dashed hopes and unrealized dreams. They didn’t really understand. They were the first to tell me that their memories don’t change the way mine do, from happy to sad and back again depending on the things that happened after them. Well, mine do. So the memories that I might have answered as my happiest just a few short months ago are now downgraded and filed away with ‘normal’ memories. I don’t expect those couple to ever change again, unfortunately.
In light of my own inability to trust my own happiness or hope in any present-based situation, I wonder if I ought to be more guarded about what I post here. Whether I ought to censor my emotions, not entirely, but for some sort of waiting period. Until I can put things into a better perspective and post a more properly gauged emotional response to a situation. I don’t want to mis-represent myself, but how I feel about past events changes as events related to it unfold, and life never seems to stop unfolding. Argh. I’m not sure I got anywhere with this.
Now, something else about being guarded on the site:
So a question comes from me: How long without listening to an album do I need to go before it is safe to sell it off, forsaking listening to it altogether?
I ask because I keep taking CDs down to Zia to trade for DVDs. Like tonight I stopped in Zia and they had Lilo and Stitch and Spiderman DVDs used for about $20 for the two, and asked them to hold them. Tomorrow morning I’ll take the stack of 15 CDs I just selected from my collection (only one of which was from the dozen or so rejected the other day) to see which they’ll offer credit for, and hope they take at least 4. The average trade credit per normal CD is $5, sometimes more for double CDs or rare CDs, and I’d like to get those DVDs without paying more. I was trying to pick CDs I thought they’d like this time, choosing some I feel should stay part of my collection. Not because I ever listen to them, or intend on listening to them, or could conceive of a situation where I would listen to them, but … because … I don’t know why.
Some are less so; albums like the ‘Songs of Iroquois Women’ or the album with 13 versions of ‘Route 66’-themed songs that I had gifted to me one way or the other, and doubt they will take, except that they were never really commercially available… Or the two Phillip Glass CDs… I like Phillip Glass, but it rarely if ever occurs to me to listen to his music. And will Zia think one of their customers would want to listen to Phillip Glass? But I’ve also got a couple of never-opened CDs that I bought and just never got around to opening. And a couple of soundtracks; people like soundtracks, right?
Where was I? Off topic, huh? What was the topic again? Oh yeah. So in an effort years-long to try to reduce the number of unlistened-to CDs in my collection, I began marking my CDs with dots about 18 months ago. That is, every time I put a CD into a player of some kind, I put a tiny colored dot sticker on the edge of the jewel case. I’ve been doing this consistently with my CDs the full 18 months, and with my DVDs for about 10 months, so I know that the 300+ CDs without dot one have not been listened to in the last year and a half. Probably longer. Which brings us back to the question:
How long should I let these dot-free CDs go before I get rid of them? I try every time I need to choose something to listen to to choose something without a dot that I might like, but it’s been slow going. Most of what it occurs to me to listen to is the same stuff that it occurred to me to listen to before. Worse, for music I’ve never or rarely listened to, I often don’t know what the tone or emotion of the music will be. I used to buy albums for a single song a lot, so I have a lot of albums I’ve only ever put in on that one track and hit repeat, or never at all if I forgot what the track was. (I’ve got two albums by Blessid Union of Souls in my stack that I’m listening to right now to try to figure out what song or songs I bought them for. If I don’t find at least one song I like, these albums don’t even get a dot, they get to go to Zia.) Is it safe to just rip the one song and sell the album? What if I would have otherwise liked the music?
Aargh. In another 18 (or 12, or 6, or 36, or whatever) months do I just sell off everything without a dot, no matter what? I’ve definitely been making a very strong effort to listen to every new (to me) CD I buy at least once. What is the expiration date on un-used music?
My “circadian” rhythm for the last three months has been a little … long? 25 hours instead of 24, on the average, though actually a little less. Actually, it’s like I’m slowly travelling backwards around the world’s time zones during the month, so that my waking/sleeping schedule is a full 12 hours off around the 15th of the month. You know, because I don’t have to wake up at a specific time for work.
Except that the six or so hours off I’ll be by tomorrow morning means that making it to my morning interview will be an exciting and fun challenge. Not too hard; I’ve managed to finish putting together that web portfolio (yes, at the last minute) before one AM, which is nice, because last night I went to bed after 2, and the night before around 1:30 and so on such that I sure hope I can get to sleep right now. My body wants to stay up another couple hours at least. Except I have to wake up in the morning and try to make myself look presentable for this interview. I have excellent interview skills. I don’t remember ever interviewing for a position and not being offered it. This may be the first, considering I’m not actually as qualified as they’d like me to be.
Good thing I ironed all my clothes. Now I get to try to choose a color. I did mention that I have shirts in every color of the rainbow, right? Sorted in rainbow order, too. And eww.. hair. That just doesn’t want to behave. So, do I not try to make it behave so that the bits that would never in a million years behave look like they are part of something larger, or pretend I think all my hair is behaving my ignoring the stand-up bits? Or shave my head tomorrow morning and go in with a red, bald scalp? or die before the interview?
I’m a little upset (not too much; I might end up with a job! Yay!) that I’ll only get to see the first hour or so (less, really) of Steve Jobs’ keynote speach tomorrow. Not that by missing the end the technologies won’t be released, just that for the hour or so (or longer, who knows?) I’m away from home I’ll be just a smidge behind the curve. Look, if I could afford it, I would be an alpha geek. As it is, I end up doing things like getting the first color mobile phone to hit the market, six months before color mobile phones get big, but then can’t afford to upgrade when the better ones come out. Though I doubt I’ll be able to resist getting the new Nokia 3650 when it hits the states (assuming I have income of some kind). I saw it on the european Nokia site a couple of months ago and emailed all over Nokia requesting that it come to the US, and am now on the list of people who will be emailed when they get permission from the FCC to sell me the phone, and have mixed feelings about the ad campaign for it. See, if everyone gets it, it’s not really bleeding edge, is it? Except it has everything I’m looking for in a mobile. Polyphonic ringing, GPRS internet access, a larger color screen, a built in camera, bluetooth, everything. I literally made a list of features I’d like to see in a phone 7 or 8 months ago, and this phone is the first to have it all.
Anyway, falling behind on sleep, falling behind on bills, falling behind on tech, and falling behind on comics. After doing the first New Comic, I wondered whether they would have to be bi-weekly or monthly, since they take so long to do. After working off and on on the next one for the last several days, I’m prone to say monthly, though I had originally aimed for weekly. We’ll see. Right now, I’m going to try to get one done ASAP, and get started on the next one as well. obviously, I didn’t make weekly; there was no comic yesterday. Maybe in another four days. We’ll see. There are some impressive and time-consuming things I’m having to to in photoshop for a couple/few of the images in this comic that I won’t have to do in future comics. Except that I’ll have to do other time-consuming and difficult things instead. sigh… You like it though, right?
I’m really going to bed now. I didn’t intend for this post to be this long. Just supposed to be a short thing before hopping into bed.
Hey everybody. Sorry if you experienced some strange things or no pages @ all on FYTH in the last couple of hours. I was going to update one thing, then I thought I’d try to fix another thing that someone mentioned was a problem with certain browsers, then everything started falling apart and I had to delete over two thousand five hundred files and regenerate them from scratch using updated templates and file naming conventions. Probably that was so vague that even tech people didn’t get anything from it. nevermind. Just, I’m sorry. It should all be working fine now. If you run into any problems, don’t hesitate to let me know. it’ll only take you a minute.