Category: Uncategorized

I should be making a comic for tomorrow. I should be working on George. I should be working on T-Shirt designs in Photoshop. I should be ironing clothes for tomorrow. I should be writing a short story or a novel or an essay or something. I should probably be sleeping. I should have re-installed Wild Divine and be working on a relaxation exercise. I should go watch an episode of The Count of Monte Cristo and … work on … something else while I do.

Angela monopolizes the TV every night. I get up at 5 or 6 in the morning work all day, get home at 8PM, and Angela has TV programs to watch every night from 8 to 10. And if I don’t go to bed by ten I couldn’t possibly get a full eight hours of sleep at night. Sigh. Netflix has slowed WAY down between this work schedule and Angela’s TV-watching.

Perhaps, when my TV arrives from Pine on Thursday, things will get re-arranged. But probably not. I’m pretty sure dad will take the TV currently in the living room back to Pine, and that Angela will continue to not watch her own TV, the one she has in her bedroom, and I’ll be relegated to watching her shows or waiting until my days off to try to watch anything. Ooh, or watching late at night. That’s fun, and certainly good for my health.

Speaking of my health, I’m going to the dentist on Thursday. Gotta have a couple of cavities filled. Been waiting literally for years to get it done. Around six months since my dad took me in to get my teeth looked and and said I could get them fixed. But it looks like he’s going to pay for one or two of the teeth this time, so that’s a good thing. Teeths is expensive.

Oh, and I mentioned the TV is coming down Thursday? Yeah. TV, entertainment center, possibly table, possibly some books… I don’t know what all, but a truck load of my stuff will be trawling down the hill Thursday morning. My father and brother should be loading it Wednesday, and the three of us will unload it Thursday, right before my dental appointment. Then … then … I don’t know. Maybe I’ll see how I feel about trying to get any of that stuff I mentioned done… the art et cetera. Or maybe I’ll just want to play Quidditch.

I kinda want to just play Quidditch right now.

But there’s stuff that ought to be done. Bare minimum for me before I go to bed: at least one ME24 comic. Doing them in the morning before work is not a fun thing. Heck, being so far behind I’m not ahead at all is not a fun thing.

Diet’s not going well. I keep eating too large of portions or eating little things that aren’t supposed to be on my diet and I haven’t checked in with eDiets yet, and I was supposed to check in with my weight on Sunday. Sunday I was down to 213 from 214, which is good. This morning I was back up to 214 or 214.5, depending on which time I weighed myself. Of course, last night I made bean burritos, a reasonable thing to eat, if I eat two small burritos. And I ate three large burritos. Approximately… well, over a pound of food wrapped in three warm tortillas. With cheese. Tonight I ate the one leftover burrito from last night’s dinner. And a slice of chocolate cream pie. And a white peach, just now. Which is better than last night, I suppose. The diet does allow for desserts, within reason. Probably not full-calorie, full-fat chocolate cream pie, but … it was just one slice.

We’ll see how much the scale thinks of me in the morning.

Damn, that reminds me to take my fibre.

I was going to look into Benefiber, since it’s supposed to dissolve completely into water, be flavorless, and be actual fiber, but it cost about … 66% more than the Metamucil, overall. And the Metamucil was twice or more (depending on volume) the cost of the generic fibre drink mix at Fry’s Marketplace. And based on how much they recommend, and how awful I know drinking Metamucil is, I was happy to see that the Metamucil Capsules contained the same amount of fibre in each capsule as an entire 8oz glass of Metamucil. So that is what I purchased; the capsules.

I started by taking the minimum recommended amounts for a couple of days, since I definitely eat lots of fruits and salads and whole-grain breads and snacks, so already have some fibre in my diet. But that was clearly and painfully not enough fibre, so I began increasing the amount I was taking, a pill at a time, until everything started moving along smoothly again. So, adding it up right now, I get … 6-7grams of fibre for breakfast, another 6+grams for second breakfast (don’t ask – I work a long day), 2grams for lunch (around 6grams when I remember to take a salad), and another ~6grams in most of my dinners … that makes around 20-25grams of fibre every day just from my food, not to mention the fibre in the 3-6 pieces of fruit I eat every day, which could be up to … 4-12grams. I have to take at least 18grams of additional, supplemental fibre to keep everything moving along smoothly, for a total of around 42-55grams of fibre/day. Do any of YOU get 55grams of fibre in your diet?

Man. If I get colon cancer, I’m suing Metamucil or someone. This is ridiculous. Yes, I know I’m overestimating; I probably only get closer to the 40/42grams a day that’s double the recommendations I keep reading all over the web.

And all of a sudden I also have money to deal with and think about. Not having any money was so much easier… there was just the constant tension of how I was going to pay my (smallish) bills for another month. Now I have money coming in at certain times, money going out all over the calendar, plus having to pay for food and think about saving up for … things, and consider … ugh… so much… that I haven’t though much about in almost two years…

And I don’t know how much my portion of the utilities is going to be, and I just signed up for Cox High Speed Internet (which I should be able to set up Thursday), and that’s $40/month, plus they want a $60 deposit right now which is reasonable but something to think about, and it seems impossible to pre-determine how much food is going to cost on a week to week basis, and there are teeth to pay for and in a couple of months there may be medical insurance payments coming out of my paychecks, and I don’t know if/when dad will start making me pay for my own phone again, and with easy access to movie theatres, how much am I going to be spending there? I’m thinking of setting myself a “movie budget” and at the beginning of each month refilling a gift card with a pre-determined amount and then only spending from the card all month.

And DVDs and CDs and … video games and … art supplies … and the idea that in a year or so I’ll have to be paying rent or mortgage payments, and how to plan for that … and thinking about maybe paying car insurance and car payments and gas and maintenance and how to plan for that, how to make that fit my mind and my lifestyle choices … and all the things I”m saving for/working toward:

an iPod (now with reduced prices!)
a GameBoy Advance SP a ‘Nintendo DS’ (which can play GBA games, too)
money for the Florida trip (that’s the week of my birthday, BTW)
an iBook (Gha, that’s expensive compared to these)
Fable for XBox (aha, a savings at only $50!)

not to mention recurring costs for things like … MMOGs (Second Life, definitely, though that may not require a monthly fee depending on how much time I have for it, and City of Heroes on Heath’s PC when he gets down here in the fall, and then maybe The Matrix Online too) and iTMS and I sure would like to pay more than the minimum payments on my outstanding debts…

In fact I was thinking earlier today that any amount of money that I spend (a running total from now) on ‘big’ items (anything >$48 that is tangible) must be matched by an equal or greater reduction in my debt (from its size now, all accounts combined, to its amount at the moment after I purchase the ‘big item’), in order to allow myself the purchase. Because seriously, my debt is out of control, 21 months unemployed without missing a payment notwithstanding. A quick look-up … and my starting debt looks to be … $17,459.30. Which seems like a lot, considering my income level for the last couple of years or so. Oh, and the fact that my current pre-tax annual income is only around $19k…

So that if I didn’t eat or … use utilities or need replacement clothes or to pay for transportation to and from work or use the internet or go to the dentist or the doctor or the movies and didn’t spend money in any other way for an entire year, after taxes I still couldn’t pay off my debt.

Did you know an online comic creator recently raised $22k in about a month? Purely from donations? Anyone wanna donate? Pick a cause, pick an expense… you wanna help pay for my teeth to be fixed, great! You wanna help pay for a new computer, an iPod, for art supplies, whatever, I’m for it! You want to help and end up with product? Buy merchandise, buy my art, buy my furniture, buy my novels, buy my BitPass stuff, even! I’m working hard, at my job, at my other projects, at not killing myself most of the time, but I still need some more help. Any help you could offer.

Hey.

How about a limited-edition, hand-painted T-Shirt? The first design, (insert applause here), is already available! Pricing is complicated and simple at the same time. Each run of limited edition shirts will be not more than 20 shirts. The starting price of each shirt design will be $20 (+S/H, when applicable). Every shirt will be numbered, 01 through 20. There will be 20 designs introduced in 2004. With every additional shirt, 02 through 20, that I produce, the price of each design goes up by $1. So the first shirt of a design’s run is $20, the second is $21, the fifth is $24, and the twentieth is $39. For two reasons:

The less there are of something available, the more it is worth.

and

The more times I have to hand-paint a design, the more annoying it becomes and the less I want to do it again.

Here is the pricing/availability of the first shirt, (insert applause here):

01 – $20 – SOLD
02 – $21
03 – $22
04 – $23
05 – $24
06 – $25
07 – $26
08 – $27
09 – $28
10 – $29
11 – $30
12 – $31
13 – $32
14 – $33
15 – $34
16 – $35
17 – $36
18 – $37
19 – $38
20 – $39

See how simple that is? Even more interesting is that if you’re silly and want a particular number I’ll let you buy it for the listed amount, even if lower-numbered shirts of that design have not yet been sold. So if you want to buy a whole set of all twenty #06 limited edition T-Shirts at once, they’ll each be $25, and you won’t have to wait for #01-#05 to sell in every design before you get yours. Hooray!

And here’s where it gets complicated:

When any design sells out all 20 available shirts, two things happen. First, the lowest-numbered shirt among all designs will no longer be available. (In the event that multiple designs are tied for lowest-number available, one will be selected semi-randomly by a method of my choosing.) That is, if shirt #01 has sold from 19 designs and the twentieth shirt of a single design sells, the last remaining #01 shirt will no longer be available, and will in fact never be made. Second, the prices of all remaining available shirts of all remaining available designs will be raised by $1. Those #06 shirts would all go to $26, for instance, though if it were a multiple-shirt order that sold-out a design (or more than one design) the complicated part of the pricing, the elimination of shirts and the raising of prices, would take place AFTER the sale was completed.

As designs are introduced, as shirts are sold, and as prices go up, a price-list page will be updated for your convenience. No, I haven’t built it yet. I want to take a photo of Zoe wearing Shirt 01 of (insert applause here) to put on the page, and he hasn’t come to pick it up yet. But I’ll build it soon, and link to it on the sidebar of FYTH, and probably in the Art section of ME.

For those of you paying attention, if the #20 shirt of the last remaining (twentieth to sell out) 2004 design is the last to sell, it would cost $58 (+S/H, if applicable). So buy early to save.

I know I would. I mean, really. These are hand-painted original works of art! Certainly worth the money, even at $58/shirt!

I’m getting silly, I’ve been typing for around 100 minutes, and I still don’t have a ME24. What a productive time this has been. What do you say? You want a shirt? You want a book? Sigh. I should go to bed.

The opening act for Sarah McLachlan was Butterfly Boucher (boucher, pronounced like voucher – she’s Australian, not French), and I liked her music quite a lot. I didn’t buy her album at the concert (considering bottled water was $10million/litre, I figured the album would be $87billion), but when I went by Zia the other night, they had several copies, and even new it was a very reasonable price, so I picked up a copy.

I really like this album. I reccommend it.

The link above is directly to the album on iTunes, where you can preview and purchase the album directly. Or, go to a local record store; I actually bought a used copy for only $5.99, which is clearly a savings over $0.99/song. I think you’ll like it.

And if you don’t, I guess that’s sortof the point of the whole “preview” thing on the iTMS.

GOOD – I cleaned the front bathroom
GOOD – I got to go see Sarah McLachlan for free, a perk of my new job and my hard work there
GOOD – Did I mention the free concert tickets to see one of my favorite artists?
GOOD – I went to a party after the concert
BAD – I drank too much at the party
BAD – I kept drinking
BAD – I blacked out
BAD – I woke up at home, on the kitchen floor, covered in my own vomit
GOOD – I took off those disgusting clothes and managed to find my bed to collapse into
BAD – I slept literally all day long Saturday; I was supposed to be at work doing overtime
GOOD – I showered and did all my laundry and changed my sheets and cleaned as much of everything I’d come in contact with as I was able
BAD – I was still very nauseous Saturday night and barely kept a light supper down
GOOD – I didn’t actually vomit again last night
BAD – I apparently vomited all over the inside of Angela’s car and slept through her cleaning it by herself
GOOD – I managed to get up in time for work today, to work all day, and come home
BAD – I apparently molested every female in sight while blacked out, then repeatedly fell down, and eventually went into spasms and lost control of my legs altogether; all to the point that my father the alcoholic and my sister were sure I needed to go to the hospital for alcohol poisoning
GOOD – They didn’t take me to the hospital; see, I’m fine now
BAD – I’m apparently so depressed and suicidal and hopeless that I don’t value my own life enough to know when to stop poisoning myself

GOOD – Equal numbers of GOOD and BAD items on this list
BAD – The BAD items are often much more BAD than the GOOD are GOOD

So, things going on today.

This is the 1000th post, for starters. Should have posted it yesterday, but failed. Heck, I only just made today

I am seeing again a thing about working for an employer that I disliked, a thing about existing and desiring to continue exist in a specific professional environment that directly conflicts with my natural desires. I keep wanting to post about things and stopping myself, out of discretion.

The same thing applies to making posts, even posts with the details changed and names removed, that are about people I know read the site, and who I see regularly. And it drives me batty.

Not because I feel like I can’t post, but because I keep finding myself not posting. I mean, all these things I think of to post and then censor out of discretion seem reasonable to me to not post, but the result, the lack of posts, does not.

I want to post. I want there to BE posts.

. . .

Now, there are other things I’m not posting. . . Things that have no such thing as a “reasonable” explanation or discretion regarding why they ought not be posted. Mostly things about love, lonliness, hope, attraction, emotion, loss, and an examination of whether a particular thing is regret or something else in me. Oh, and depression. It seems I’m not feeling well, again, but you don’t really know the extent of it.

Such as the first thoughts of suicide (beyond purely technical or external) since … well, I suppuse since 1998. That was a tough year. The first year into a drought can be the toughest, I suppose – before one becomes acclimated to perpetual thirst under clear blue skies.

Such as the first serious thoughts of cutting myself, ever. Ever. Well, not counting times I was cutting myself with the intention of taking my own life; I don’t think that counts, since I was trying to get rid of the pain, disprove the life, rather than … well … the sort of things I find my mind drifting to of late. And the parts of my mind that want to keep me seeming almost-normal in the eyes of the world and the future are already working out elaborate ways to excuse it. Discovering places on my body where any scarring could be hidden, explained away lightly. Determining how best to do it to prevent scarring in general, what sort of immediate and longer-term techniques will result in the smallest, lightest visible scarring. Working out plans to bleed and bleed and bleed and create works of art with the blood collected, so that worst-case when someone sees what I’ve done to myself I have some sort of . . . artist’s hand forced by his art story to point to, and works to go with the marks. I think it was that time I accidentally cut open my foot and all the blood pooled and puddled on my bathroom floor, two years or so ago, that opened this door. I’d always been so careful not to let myself bleed, not to let myself see a lot of blood outside of clinical conditions, and now the door is open and … and it’s giving me an excellent excuse to mutilate myself. sort of

Such as drinking. On multiple occassions. And plans to do more. And plans to cut going to bars out altogether and just sit around at home and drink by myself. Because it’s cheaper and less likely to cause . . . repurcussions.

Such as overeating, and wanting to overeat. The diet is not going as well as I’d like, in a couple of ways. First, it costs too much money, too much time, to eat well. I’ve just changed my meal plans around for a combination of lowest possible difficulty and lowest possible grocery cost, which as a result means my meals will have the least possible interest. With my current schedule, with getting home around 8 or later from work and having to get up the next morning at 5 or 6, there isn’t a lot of time for cooking. In fact, I’m pretty sure that eating as lat as I have been has been part of the problem. Perhaps I should just train my body to sleep … 5 hours or less? Perhaps 4, like benjamin franklin or 3, like thomas jefferson. I should be sleeping now. Whatever. The idea being that I keep having to eat at strange times, keep skipping meals or eating extra stuff… there is weight coming off, but it’s … not steady, and I’m not sure it’s healthy.

And I haven’t yet got started on the Bowflex. Not sure where I’ll fit that in. Somewhere between working all the time, cooking the rest of the time I’m not sleeping, and masturbating for hours.

I decided recently (and am just beginning to implement with any regularity) to turn my masturbatory sessions back into the “workouts” they were in my “youth”. That is, instead of just masturbating for pleasure/endorphins, I shall be training my sexual responses to specific ends. I recall in my youth I had as many as three or four separate agendas, including associating intense ball-busting pain with a release of endorphins and an otherwise pleasurable sensation, ejaculating for the greatest possible distance, maintaining an erection for the greatest period of time possible, and associating orgasm with specific imagery and fantasies so that under normal circumstances I would not orgasm except by specifically choosing to imagine the desired imagery/fantasies. All of these went reasonably well, actually.

Right now I’m just working on maintaining the associative image I’ve spent the last four years or so drilling into my brain as a trigger to orgasm and the new thing is to work again on endurance. Back in the day I could go hours before my first orgasm, but in the last year the average has been a lot closer to 17 minutes, and 2 minutes is an achievable goal. Now, I realize that the average male in my age group (25 to 49) actually climaxes, on average, 17 minutes after ‘sex’ has been initiated, and that the average woman in the same age group averages 19 minutes (though due to the visual nature of men’s sexuality, the beginning of sex for men is often sooner than for women), but I sure would like to be … above average? So I’m working on only masturbating when I have at least an hour to devote to it, and not orgasming until around an hour has passed, and not losing my erection the entire time.

So, there’s that.

How did I get there?

I don’t recall, and I don’t feel like scrolling up, and my back hurts and I’m not tired, so I think I’ll take some pills and keep typing for a while.

. . .

Have I mentioned that I’m a sort of obsessive cleaner? Not … not obsessive about living or keeping a clean house, or a clean room or … any of that. Not maintaining clean, not being neat, or a “neat freak”. Just … when I clean, I want to do it right, and as completely as possible. So when I worked on the kitchen on Friday, I worked from one end to the other and didn’t stop until I got there. Now, I didn’t leave the counter and get to the floor or turn around and clean the other side of the room, but …. I haven’t had a kitchen of “my own” for a long time, so I’m just ramping up. This week on my days off, I’ll probably re-do that part of the kitchen, move to include the rest of the kitchen, and perhaps go as far as one of the bathrooms.

But I’ve missed part of the point. I know I mentioned it in my other post; when I was cleaning, there was no clean kitchen sponge and none of the cleaners that I could locate in the house were disinfectant. Cleaners the cut grease, cleaners that don’t streak on glass, cleaners made with “real” “orange power”, but nothing that disinfects (save straight bleach). Who knows what isn’t in the bathrooms? I suppose I’ll discover that when I get there, and have to go to the store and pick up some cleaning supplies. Like I did this last “weekend”. So now I have disinfectant cleanser and sponges. And I use them all the time. And I made Angela buy the 12-pack of paper towels instead of the 6-pack or the 1-pack, not just because it’s a better deal, but because this house is a fucking mess and I know I’m going to clean it, and I know I’m not just going to wipe bacteria all over the place by using the same dirty rags and sponges all over the place. Paper towels are excellent. Once you’ve filled one with e.coli, just throw it away. Trees and forests be damned. If the wood and paper manufacturers and the loggers don’t figure out that wood is a renewable resource only if they themselves renew it, the world as we know it will change in ways that go way beyond paper towels. The major players in the oil industry are only putting money into developing alternative, renewable fuel sources fast enough that a solution will be available as the last drop of oil is burned and no sooner, but at least they’re working on it. Anyway, yeah. Paper towels, I go through them like crazy.

Not obsessive-compulsive crazy. I’m not washing every surface 10 or 70 times a day. But when I do get around to cleaning, things get clean.

If, when it gets to be that time, I can’t locate a mop and pail, I’ll get down on my hands and knees with a rag and clean the floor by hand, little by little. And fuck dad for tiling practically the entire house, it’s a pain in the ass to clean. He says he doesn’t like carpet because dirt gets under it, but fuck if I don’t live my life above the carpet. Does he like to crawl around under it from time to time, just to get dirty? Shit.

I went grocery shopping at Sam’s Club with my sisster tonight. Got almost everything I needed. Ran into a friend of a … of someone I haven’t talked to in over five months … ran into someone I met once and didn’t recognise at first, but talked to anyway. Need to go grocery shopping tomorrow night to get the rest of everything on the grocery list, plus a few items that are not exactly groceries. Which reminds me we didn’t remember to buy gum at Sam’s Club. Perhaps we shall return there.

What’s left on the list… Shoe polish, because I can’t find mine. Some sort of fibre supliment. Some lotion. Oh, and the ~3 frozen meals and the 1/2 gallon of frozen yogurt or sorbet from the grocery list. There was something else. What was it?

Ah, now I’m beginning to be tired.

Must be that getting up early in the morning and working all day thing. I hear rumor that I’ll get a paycheck on Friday which will reimburse me for all the work I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks. I can only hope. Sure would make things like keeping my bills paid a bit easier. Oh, and buying groceries. And alcohol. And maybe if I can afford to keep myself distracted enough I won’t kill myself or mutilate myself too badly. Ah, well.

I’m off to bed, now it seems. Couldn’t quite stay up late enough to hear back from … someone who was online a while ago and promised to be back. Later.