Author: Teel

Wow. I actually managed to very nearly (but not quite) get through the whole day without making this post. I certainly didn’t get through the day without thinking about her. Started last night, when I noticed that the clock said 12:00 and I said “Happy Birthday, Amanda” right back at it. Later, I prayed for her health and safety, wherever she may be. That’s actually something I find myself doing for the people I love more often than I’d like to admit. I always feel like it must be an obsession if every time I speak to God or make a wish or think of love, I remember these three young women who each changed my heart in their own way.

Funny thing about their birthdays, though. As of right now I have only ever seen two of the three of them on any of their birthdays, and each of those two only once each in all the years I’ve known them. Melissa I saw on her 16th birthday. Sara I saw on her 18th. Amanda, whose birthday is the 4th of July, I have never seen on her birthday. I have never been able to wish her a happy birthday in any meaningful way. I have remembered her birthday, but the same way I have done this week and this day, mostly by trying to get in contact with her and then just wishing her a happy birthday even though I didn’t find her.

I didn’t have to pay any money to search for her this time. I called up 800 US SEARCH and gave them my case number from December (so they could see the valid results I got and work from those) and asked them to run the same search again with the data we got last time, and they did it for free. Sort of. You see, there was no new data on Amanda (still hasn’t bought property or taken out a car loan in her own name, I suppose; neither have I), and the most recent address for her mother is no longer in the Db (which means she moved) but there are 600+ people in the US with her mother’s same name. Which would be more cold-calling than I am comfortable doing. So, I didn’t pay money for the search, which is good because I would have ended up with less results than last time.

I did some searches on free internet sources and found a few Amanda Kings listed in the states I know she’s lived in or has relatives in (OR and AZ) but none of them were the Amanda I was looking for. Actually, 800 US SEARCH gave me the addresses of several young women around the country with the exact same birthday as my Amanda (7/4/1980) and names of either Amanda Renee [any last name] or Amanda R. King, and I used my internet skills to pull up their phone numbers and call them all (about 12 calls total), but none of them were the Amanda I was looking for. One was fun; I kept getting an answering machine, but I hate leaving a message (because if it isn’t her, they won’t call back and if it IS her, she might not call back), so I tried it a few times and gave up for the day. I got a call at 3:30AM the next morning from that Amanda King wondering why I have been calling but not leaving a message. I love caller ID. That Amanda was in her 50s.

Anyway, no luck so far this year trying to find her. I thought I saw her in town six months ago, but she’s not listed if she is, and I haven’t seen her since. So, if anyone of you knows an Amanda Renee King, born on the 4th of July in 1980 whose mother was known to me as Sandie, but who also goes by the names Sandra P. Schneider and Sandra P. Montana, who has a brother named Chris (last name not known), let me know. All three of these people lived in the Phoenix area until late August 1996 when Amanda and Sandie moved to Coos Bay/North Bend, Oregon, which is where I last made contact with them, in the summer of 1997. Any help you can provide or databases you can access or direct me to would be great.

Otherwise, I’ll just keep praying for her, and wishing her a happy birthday to the empty room or the sky above.

Happy Birthday, Amanda King. I love you.

On what basically amounts to a forum specifically for students of my ENG 221 class to discuss the reading assingments critically, everyone had a certain minimum number of posts per topic that had to be posted. Sometiems we’d get going into an interesting conversation and meeting the minimum was no problem. Other times it was more of a struggle. The post I’m about to quote is one that I wrote when going back and filling in where I had not met the minimum posts by one post for one day’s reading, so it didn’t result in further comment, but I thought it was interesting.

If you are already aware of Hobbes and his Leviathan, this will make even more sense, but suffice it to say that in a discussion that stemmed from an interpretation of literature from centuries ago, I accidentally found myself using Star Wars as an analogy:

Okay, I don’t mean to get into a Star Wars debate, but although Anakin says he does not want to be the one to decide, and though (it is believed that) he becomes Darth Vader later, it is not Darth Vader who is the sovereign, but the Emperor. I believe that in viewing the Star Wars epic, Hobbes would first be amazed (movies, or really anything this visually realistic and fantastic, did not exist in his time), but then would most likely judge against the supposed heroes of the series. He would say that the rebels and smugglers that went against the sovereign power of the Emperor should not ever be accepted into any society, and that if it were not for the Emperor’s reign, all humans in the galaxy would be at war with one another.

If you have seen Episode II, you can see that Senator Palpatine only assumes the role as sovereign and forms the army of the republic with the intention of quelling the uprisings present in a system with no clear sovereign, which Hobbes predicted would be the result. Hobbes would probably like Jar Jar Binks for nominating Palpatine to bring order to the chaos of all men warring against each other that was otherwise reducing the republic. In this way, Palpatine’s rise to power, just as Hitler’s, is supported by Hobbes’ arguments.

As some of you are already aware, I watch a lot of movies. When I watch movies I often take Edison, a stuffed monkey, along with me. We have, in the past, done movie reviews of a sort of some of the movies we’ve watched. In fact, that was part of why I originally started carrying him with me down to the local theater to see movies; I didn’t want to be writing reviews with him if he hadn’t actualyl seen the movies we were discussing. Except that now we don’t seem to be reviewing any movies. I take him to the movies around 2/3 of the time, but we review less than one in twenty movies, it seems. When I first started carrying a stuffed monkey with me down to the movies, and people would ask me why I had a stuffed monkey with me, I used to be able to say ‘We review movies at my website’ and hand them a card with the URL on it. Now that we haven’t done a review in a coon’s age, I can say ‘we do movie reviews sometimes’ but am reluctant to give out the card, since we have only done one review since February.

So I’ve reached a point where I’d like to start writing about the movies I’m watching again, if only because I calim to do so once in a while. Except I’m not sure I really want to write reviews, per se. I don’t usually have a general recomendation about whether anyone should see a movie, though if someone I know asks me about a movie, I can make a personal recommendation about that specific movie. I often have something to say about most movies I see, and sometimes movies I haven’t seen, and I think I’d like to get them posted somehow. The problem right now is that I often want to mention things that are “spoilers”; things that would give away some essential part of the movie to someone who hasn’t seen it.

In real life, I can simply verify whether or not the person I am speaking with has already seen, or has no plans to ever see, the movie in question before saying anything that would give something away. I really like twists in movies myself, and never like giving them away to people who have not yet seen the movie but may. I have no such control on the web. Worse, if I call what I’ll be writing a review, I’ll upset some people twofold: First by not really reviewing the basic story of the movie, and Second by breaking the unwritten rule of reviews and revealing important plot points.

I guess reviews are generally intended to be read before seeing a movie, to help people decide about whether they should spend the money to see it or not. I’ve never been good at helping people with that; in my opinion there are more movies worth seeing than not, and most people can’t afford financially or temporally to see them all. I really believe that for any movie with a marketing push behind it, anyone I come across has already decided whether they will see it or not before they get to me. For other movies, I have to explain what the movie is, and as soon as they know the idea of the movie they make up their minds before I make a recommendation. Most people only watch a few types of movies, and no matter how great I say Gosford Park is, the Action/Adventure-only-guy won’t go see it.

What I want to write is targeted more to people who have already seen the movie, or people that plan never to see the movie. What kind of warning can I give to let people know that? Just state that at the top of every one of these ‘reviews’? I don’t know. I’m going to lunch.

Okay, so readership is up lately, which is a good thing. People are finding the site. I’d like to thank Google’s regular spidering of my site for a lot of the hits we’ve been getting lately. For instance, for yesterday, July 1st alone, these are the top 30 search engine keywords for people who searchd google and got to a page on Modern Evil. Did you know we have oozing feet, nurse entrepreneurs, and may suffer withdrawal symptoms from crack? I sure did.

1. someonelikesyou 2
2. winkin blinkin nod 2
3. antibiotic; dermititis 1
4. bi slut community 1
5. blind apartment hunting 1
6. bushel and peck 1
7. diabetes itchy 1
8. fibro mialgia 1
9. free bleeding type action for photoshop 5 1
10. happy noodle boy 1
11. homemade rollercoaster 1
12. house hold stop sweating 1
13. just preteens 1
14. messaage 1
15. nurse entreprenuer 1
16. oozing feet 1
17. persaverance 1
18. song i am your superman 1
19. stick figure comics 1
20. stick figure matrix 1
21. sweet bare feet 1
22. voyuers at work 1
23. what is your ya ya sister name? 1
24. winkin blinkin 1
25. winkin blinkin and nod song 1
26. winkin’ blinkin’ and nod 1
27. winkin, blinkin and nod 1
28. withdrawl symtoms from crack 1
29. ya ya sister name

I should be sleeping right now. I am tired and awake at the same time. Hot and cold. A little upset that I’m not upset anymore. And by anymore, I am referring how upset used to be a way of life for me. Depressed wasn’t something I did for a few days or a few weeks, it was like my hair or my eyes, it was something I always had with me. Now I’m very comfortable with almost every aspect of my life, and I’ve identified what I like doing and how I’d like to live my life, and I’m doing what I can to stay headed in that direction. Now I do everything I can to not have hair, and anyone who’s spent much time with me in recent years has seen me try to gouge my own eyes out, and I’m just not depressed anymore. Sometimes the one or two bits of my life that I haven’t got a handle on start to get to me and I feel almost like what depressed was for a few days or weeks, but it’s not like before. I just don’t seem to have it in me. Too much in my life is going well, too much in myself is how I want it to be. I just can’t sustain a foul mood anymore. Usually within a day, at most a few days, and I find myself bubbling over with laughter, consumed with joy for one reason or another and realizing that it’s just not that bad. No matter how hard I try after that, no matter how deep my funk was beginning to be, I just can’t sink into it properly again.

“I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart. Down in my heart. Down in my heart. I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart. Down in my heart to stay.”

I just can’t escape it. And I know I asked for it. I remember the moment, though not the day on the calendar. If I had known what I was asking for, I don’t know what I would have done. You see, there is so much creativity to be had in despair. So much hope to be had when you’re looking up from the bottom. So much art comes out of depression and depravitiy and this darned joy just won’t let me get down to that level. I look at all these beautiful things around me, music and art and literature and movies and so much more, and so much of it is born out of loss and pain and fear and hope for something better than the stink and depravity of the creator’s life. Even when my home is at its messiest and I’m as financially strapped as I get, you can still see the floor and people still come over and say ‘this is nothing’ and I can still pay my bills, and I can still see the point not too far away when I will be financially comfortable again. Not matter how dark it gets, there’s always a light, and I know everything is going according to the plan. Even though I don’t know the plan, it’s still all too comforting knowing that it’s all going according to plan anyway. I just can’t seem to get upset about how things are going, because I know none of it is a surprize to the one that really matters, and that if things were supposed to have gone any other way, they would have.

Wait. I don’t want to babble about predestination vs. free will here. I actually believe in both. I don’t see how it all being laid out ahead of time implies that someone else is making my decisions for me; they simply knew which decisions I was going to be making on my own before I did. Anyway. What WAS I going to babble about? Oh yes. Being a stalker.

Continue reading Rambling when I should be sleeping