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edgBack at work, after having been sick yesterday - and I'm not 100% sure I'm better. I'm slightly dizzy, my sense of gravity is off (I've mentioned this before: when I get tired, my sense of "down" tends to skew off into the horizontal, usually forward or to the side), and every joint in my body aches, although my neck and my right arm are bothering me the most. Also, I have a killer headache.
In addition to all of that, I smell like a darkroom. This is not because I've been developing photographs, but because I'm wearing new black pants whose dye hasn't had the chance to settle all the way, so it still smells like developing fluid. (I'm not sure what the chemical is that produces this smell, but it's definitely an acid.)
In completely unrelated news, my family has been living in the house I live in now for 19 years today. (We kids didn't move in until the 18th, because our parents didn't want us in the way of the movers. But the stuff got moved in on the 17th.)
I think I'll do this "50 things you might not know about me" meme.
1. I don't deal well with internal deadlines: by which I mean that I have no capacity for meeting them. This is a combination of a lack of discipline and the knowledge that there are no material consequences for failing to meet the deadline. External deadlines - those imposed by others - I can meet without trouble, unless there's an insurmountable problem with the material.
2. I don't actually like my day job. I sometimes enjoy the work I do, but I really don't enjoy the job itself. I know, this is pretty much everybody else's story, too, but I just thought I'd get it out in the open.
3. I'd like to open a store. Usually it's a video-game store, specializing in used games and cheap rentals, but I can be swayed by what I'm reading at the time. For instance, right now I've been reading the web logs of DNA Lounge (which is currently having DNS issues due to switching registrars) and Studio Z, two nightclubs in the SOMA district of San Francisco, and I want to open a nightclub.
4. I have been to a club once. I was fifteen, and went to Radio Music Hall in DC for a They Might Be Giants show. I loved the music, but the club (and the opening act) sucked.
5. I like Pokémon. It gets a little cheesy sometimes, but everything gets a little cheesy sometimes.
6. There is no item six.
7. I hold onto issues far longer than I should, more so when I think I'm at fault for something.
8. On a related note, I tend to think that once I've annoyed someone, I'm going to continue doing it. I am still convinced that people are angry at me over something I did eight months ago.
9. Bad web design bugs the hell out of me. This ranges from things like splash pages on websites (by which I mean: when you load a base URL, like www.foo.com, in your browser, you get a page with an image, or Flash animation, or whatever, on it. This page takes you to the "real" index page, with the actual information. That first page is a splash page, and there is no point to them whatsoever except to make people click more times, and potentially to get more page-hits), to not realizing that people are browsing with windows larger than 800x600 and maybe you should make your background image a little wider than 801 pixels, to truly horrible color combinations... I could go on for days.
10. I'm still disappointed that I only really got into the web design business just as the web design business was crashing.
11. I hate the term "dot-bomb". I've been hearing it for what, three and a half years? Find a new catchphrase, people.
12. I have to be in a certain mood to learn things on my own. I can't just sit down and say "I'm going to learn this today"; if I'm not in the right mood, the material won't sink in, no matter how hard I try. I also don't know how to trigger this mood.
13. I don't like reading game logs. I'm not 100% sure why this is. I think it's at least partly because it reminds me that I'm not gaming as much as I used to, and not at all online (I have a huge amount of trouble following journal games; I'm not currently in any OTT games except![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fadethecat's fantasy game, which hasn't started yet; and my supers game has yet to get off the ground, mostly due to having Alex here).
14. I intensely dislike sites (I use the term loosely here) like![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
customerssuck and bad_rpers_suck. A lot of it has to do with the willful ignorance or idiocy of a lot of the posters.
15. I like cooking, but I'm not very good at it.
16. I want to be a musician. I also want to be a writer. I also want to be an artist. I also want to be a programmer. In fact, I have far too many fields of interest for my own good.
17. I never think I'm going to have anything to say to my counselor during my biweekly appointments. I always fill the entire hour.
18. I like such a wide variety of music that it's an exercise in futility to describe my tastes. The only genres I won't listen to are country/western, rap, and hip-hop, and even then I'll make exceptions. Recently I've been enjoying progressive and Celtic rock.
19. I occasionally have fantasies about driving my car off the road and getting into a fatal car accident. These aren't "fantasies" in the "I'd like to..." sense, but in the "what if..." sense.
20. I am in love with at least one of the people on my friends list.
21. I like having secrets, and I like surprising people. Occasionally, the two come together: when I give gifts, I will sometimes do so anonymously, only taking credit if pressed. I don't do so as much as I used to, because it appears that this bothers people more than I thought it did.
22. I have political ambitions, although I mostly keep them secret and safe.
23. I have only two real, permanent scars on my body, and both were inflicted (either directly or indirectly) by animals. The minor one is on my right index finger, just above the first knuckle, and is the result of a cat scratch; the major one is on my face, next to my right eye, and is the result of being knocked into an iron railing by my grandmother's dog when I was two years old. (The railing did not break the skin, but burst the blood vessels underneath, and they scarred, leaving a dent in my skin.) Several people have commented that it looks like a dueling scar; I don't think so, but I'm content to let them imagine.
24. I have a dial-up connection at home that connects at around 44,000 bps on good days (the modem's a 56k), but this is not by choice. Our telephone lines are as old as the road, and do not support DSL (not to mention there's not a substation anywhere near us to provide the service), and cable has not yet been run down our road; it would cost me more than $4,000 to have cable installed at my house. We have a satellite dish, but can't get satellite internet because we don't have a good enough horizon.
25. I want to spend at least a moment outside Earth's atmosphere before I die.
26. I want to build a telescope in the backyard. (I also want to build several major additions to the house, including a covered stairway to the hill behind the house and a full observatory.)
27. I really, really don't like the cootie-catcher/fortune-teller "memes" - the ones with the fields that you fill in, that give you randomized answers based on what you put in - that started off with MemeGen and grew from there. If nothing else, it prompts people to make up stupid "cute" names for their sites, like "Kwizie".
28. I never went to kindergarten, and changed schools just before second grade. This meant that I had the dual disadvantage of being both young (I graduated at 16) and the New Kid. I didn't make many (read: more than two) friends that first year, and only made a few more over the next ten years (and lost the two I'd had to begin with); that had a lot to do with my self-worth problems later in life.
(I suspect that #28 will be the one to get the most "pobrecito" responses. Yeah, I know, everybody had a horrible childhood, except the ones who had awesome childhoods and can't understand why everybody else is complaining. I'm just sayin'.)
29. I've had to explain my decision to go for a Computer Science major when I return to Earlham to nearly everyone to whom I've talked about it. (For the record, it's because I don't know whether I'm going to be able to continue on to graduate school, where I hope to do work in folklore and mythology. If I can't, I'd prefer something a little less nebulous than Classical Studies to show potential employers. Plus, I'm good with computers.)
30. My ambitions rarely bear fruit. This is mostly because I can't figure out how to get myself or other people motivated.
31. I rarely have fewer than 30 books checked out from the library at a given time. Often it's more like 50-75. I typically read at least 75% of the total page-count of the books I've checked out before I have to return them.
32. During and after my senior year of high school, I volunteered at the library. This irritated at least one school official; mine was the last class to not have to participate in compulsory community service as a condition of graduation, and the official felt that I was "taking volunteer positions away from other students who [need] them". A few months before I left the library, I was elevated to a paid position, because one of the other paid workers had left. Both of my sisters have also worked at the library.
33. As a result of working at the library, I am now thoroughly confused any time I enter the branch at which I worked, since they've remodeled it completely. I much prefer the larger branch to the south, since it's between home and work, and since they haven't remodeled as much.
34. I am involved in a letter-writing campaign to get comic-book trade paperbacks and manga collections reassigned to the adult section of the library. ("Campaign" is really kind of a strong word; it's just me. But I write once a week, and have for the last six months or so.)
35. I haven't kept in touch with my Earlham friends as much as I'd like to, and I regret that tremendously. Aside from Dave, I'm not sure I've actually seen anyone from Earlham in two and a half years.
36. I typically believe very strongly in politeness and decorum - although less so online than in person. I have been late to appointments because I was holding the door for an unanticipated flood of people. (Vide the opening scenes of the recent Bedazzled remake.) I have also, as it turns out, driven people away with this; they took "uncertain and trying to err on the side of caution" for "creepy".
37. I tend to be attracted to people who are unavailable to me. This isn't causal; it isn't because I'm attracted that they aren't unavailable, and it isn't because they're unavailable that I'm attracted. It just happens that way.
38. During a week-long Internet binge (in 1997), I got off the computer long enough to sit down and watch The Net, with Sandra Bullock. I had to stop halfway through, because not being able to interact with the movie was driving me nuts.
39. I frequently get the impression that I'm not good enough for other people, in many capacities.
40. I frequently wonder if everybody goes through the things that I go through, and just don't talk about them, and have the good graces not to mention it when I talk about them. A large part of this is due to my constantly second-guessing myself, especially in unfamiliar situations. (At the Otakon pre-registration early pickup on Thursday night, there was only one long line for picking up tickets. I was still not entirely convinced that I was in the right place until I actually got to the registration booth. This is how much I second-guess myself.)
41. It's been said that the key characteristic of the successful is that they didn't know it couldn't be done. One of the reasons for my failures is that I tend to enter projects with my subconscious telling me that I can't do this.
42. One of the reasons I truly value my counselor is because she doesn't have any connections to anybody else that I know. I can talk to her about things that I can't tell anyone else because of the nature of social circles. Unfortunately, I still self-censor with my counselor, so some things that I've really needed to say have never been said.
43. I have a secret journal for saying things that I can't say. I haven't updated in six months. To anyone but me, it looks as though I've never updated it.
44. I like to write code, and lately I've been indulging that on the MUSH I frequent. Every so often I have the urge to see if my code is being used. It rarely is. (The exceptions tend to be the code that wasn't originally my idea.)
45. Every day, around 1 PM, I get massively tired, regardless of when I woke up and how much sleep I had the night before. I don't know why this happens. It passes by 2 PM.
46. I'm self-censoring even now, for fear of making people paranoid.
47. The song listed in my journal posts is rarely what's actually playing when I write the entry; I tend to go out of my way to find an appropriate song. I also don't like posting entries without a mood and music listing, so if music isn't playing and there's no background music, I'll open WinAmp to get a song.
48. I try to run a largely public journal. Over the last year, I've had an average of about one friends-only post every ten days, and about three-quarters of those are actually locked to specific people.
49. I don't like yaoi. This has nothing to do with either my sexual preference or my feelings about other sexual preferences; for what it's worth, I'm fairly strongly heterosexual, and I don't rally care what other people do, as long as they don't try to force it on me. This has much to do with both overexposure (everywhere I turn, look, it's yaoi!) and the attitude I encounter with startling frequency that non-heterosexual fiction is somehow better than heterosexual fiction. The fact that I don't like yaoi doesn't make it worse than hetero fic; it just means that it isn't to my tastes. (Also, yaoi just isn't to my tastes.) I also don't like people going out of their way to look for or invent relationships that aren't there in the source material, and I don't like this regardless of the genders of the members of the purported relationship. This is the "Jesus Christ, people" to yaoi's "Oh, no thanks."
<self-censoring>
50. For whatever reason, I really don't like being asked about what I'm working on. "What are you working on?" is fine; "how's [whatever] coming?" isn't. It feels like bugging, to me, no matter how lightly it's meant; and feeling like I'm being bugged makes me not want to work on the project.
51. I am forcing myself (and having to force myself) not to go back and edit what I've written for both clarity and content.
In addition to all of that, I smell like a darkroom. This is not because I've been developing photographs, but because I'm wearing new black pants whose dye hasn't had the chance to settle all the way, so it still smells like developing fluid. (I'm not sure what the chemical is that produces this smell, but it's definitely an acid.)
In completely unrelated news, my family has been living in the house I live in now for 19 years today. (We kids didn't move in until the 18th, because our parents didn't want us in the way of the movers. But the stuff got moved in on the 17th.)
I think I'll do this "50 things you might not know about me" meme.
1. I don't deal well with internal deadlines: by which I mean that I have no capacity for meeting them. This is a combination of a lack of discipline and the knowledge that there are no material consequences for failing to meet the deadline. External deadlines - those imposed by others - I can meet without trouble, unless there's an insurmountable problem with the material.
2. I don't actually like my day job. I sometimes enjoy the work I do, but I really don't enjoy the job itself. I know, this is pretty much everybody else's story, too, but I just thought I'd get it out in the open.
3. I'd like to open a store. Usually it's a video-game store, specializing in used games and cheap rentals, but I can be swayed by what I'm reading at the time. For instance, right now I've been reading the web logs of DNA Lounge (which is currently having DNS issues due to switching registrars) and Studio Z, two nightclubs in the SOMA district of San Francisco, and I want to open a nightclub.
4. I have been to a club once. I was fifteen, and went to Radio Music Hall in DC for a They Might Be Giants show. I loved the music, but the club (and the opening act) sucked.
5. I like Pokémon. It gets a little cheesy sometimes, but everything gets a little cheesy sometimes.
6. There is no item six.
7. I hold onto issues far longer than I should, more so when I think I'm at fault for something.
8. On a related note, I tend to think that once I've annoyed someone, I'm going to continue doing it. I am still convinced that people are angry at me over something I did eight months ago.
9. Bad web design bugs the hell out of me. This ranges from things like splash pages on websites (by which I mean: when you load a base URL, like www.foo.com, in your browser, you get a page with an image, or Flash animation, or whatever, on it. This page takes you to the "real" index page, with the actual information. That first page is a splash page, and there is no point to them whatsoever except to make people click more times, and potentially to get more page-hits), to not realizing that people are browsing with windows larger than 800x600 and maybe you should make your background image a little wider than 801 pixels, to truly horrible color combinations... I could go on for days.
10. I'm still disappointed that I only really got into the web design business just as the web design business was crashing.
11. I hate the term "dot-bomb". I've been hearing it for what, three and a half years? Find a new catchphrase, people.
12. I have to be in a certain mood to learn things on my own. I can't just sit down and say "I'm going to learn this today"; if I'm not in the right mood, the material won't sink in, no matter how hard I try. I also don't know how to trigger this mood.
13. I don't like reading game logs. I'm not 100% sure why this is. I think it's at least partly because it reminds me that I'm not gaming as much as I used to, and not at all online (I have a huge amount of trouble following journal games; I'm not currently in any OTT games except
fadethecat's fantasy game, which hasn't started yet; and my supers game has yet to get off the ground, mostly due to having Alex here).14. I intensely dislike sites (I use the term loosely here) like
customerssuck and bad_rpers_suck. A lot of it has to do with the willful ignorance or idiocy of a lot of the posters.15. I like cooking, but I'm not very good at it.
16. I want to be a musician. I also want to be a writer. I also want to be an artist. I also want to be a programmer. In fact, I have far too many fields of interest for my own good.
17. I never think I'm going to have anything to say to my counselor during my biweekly appointments. I always fill the entire hour.
18. I like such a wide variety of music that it's an exercise in futility to describe my tastes. The only genres I won't listen to are country/western, rap, and hip-hop, and even then I'll make exceptions. Recently I've been enjoying progressive and Celtic rock.
19. I occasionally have fantasies about driving my car off the road and getting into a fatal car accident. These aren't "fantasies" in the "I'd like to..." sense, but in the "what if..." sense.
20. I am in love with at least one of the people on my friends list.
21. I like having secrets, and I like surprising people. Occasionally, the two come together: when I give gifts, I will sometimes do so anonymously, only taking credit if pressed. I don't do so as much as I used to, because it appears that this bothers people more than I thought it did.
22. I have political ambitions, although I mostly keep them secret and safe.
23. I have only two real, permanent scars on my body, and both were inflicted (either directly or indirectly) by animals. The minor one is on my right index finger, just above the first knuckle, and is the result of a cat scratch; the major one is on my face, next to my right eye, and is the result of being knocked into an iron railing by my grandmother's dog when I was two years old. (The railing did not break the skin, but burst the blood vessels underneath, and they scarred, leaving a dent in my skin.) Several people have commented that it looks like a dueling scar; I don't think so, but I'm content to let them imagine.
24. I have a dial-up connection at home that connects at around 44,000 bps on good days (the modem's a 56k), but this is not by choice. Our telephone lines are as old as the road, and do not support DSL (not to mention there's not a substation anywhere near us to provide the service), and cable has not yet been run down our road; it would cost me more than $4,000 to have cable installed at my house. We have a satellite dish, but can't get satellite internet because we don't have a good enough horizon.
25. I want to spend at least a moment outside Earth's atmosphere before I die.
26. I want to build a telescope in the backyard. (I also want to build several major additions to the house, including a covered stairway to the hill behind the house and a full observatory.)
27. I really, really don't like the cootie-catcher/fortune-teller "memes" - the ones with the fields that you fill in, that give you randomized answers based on what you put in - that started off with MemeGen and grew from there. If nothing else, it prompts people to make up stupid "cute" names for their sites, like "Kwizie".
28. I never went to kindergarten, and changed schools just before second grade. This meant that I had the dual disadvantage of being both young (I graduated at 16) and the New Kid. I didn't make many (read: more than two) friends that first year, and only made a few more over the next ten years (and lost the two I'd had to begin with); that had a lot to do with my self-worth problems later in life.
(I suspect that #28 will be the one to get the most "pobrecito" responses. Yeah, I know, everybody had a horrible childhood, except the ones who had awesome childhoods and can't understand why everybody else is complaining. I'm just sayin'.)
29. I've had to explain my decision to go for a Computer Science major when I return to Earlham to nearly everyone to whom I've talked about it. (For the record, it's because I don't know whether I'm going to be able to continue on to graduate school, where I hope to do work in folklore and mythology. If I can't, I'd prefer something a little less nebulous than Classical Studies to show potential employers. Plus, I'm good with computers.)
30. My ambitions rarely bear fruit. This is mostly because I can't figure out how to get myself or other people motivated.
31. I rarely have fewer than 30 books checked out from the library at a given time. Often it's more like 50-75. I typically read at least 75% of the total page-count of the books I've checked out before I have to return them.
32. During and after my senior year of high school, I volunteered at the library. This irritated at least one school official; mine was the last class to not have to participate in compulsory community service as a condition of graduation, and the official felt that I was "taking volunteer positions away from other students who [need] them". A few months before I left the library, I was elevated to a paid position, because one of the other paid workers had left. Both of my sisters have also worked at the library.
33. As a result of working at the library, I am now thoroughly confused any time I enter the branch at which I worked, since they've remodeled it completely. I much prefer the larger branch to the south, since it's between home and work, and since they haven't remodeled as much.
34. I am involved in a letter-writing campaign to get comic-book trade paperbacks and manga collections reassigned to the adult section of the library. ("Campaign" is really kind of a strong word; it's just me. But I write once a week, and have for the last six months or so.)
35. I haven't kept in touch with my Earlham friends as much as I'd like to, and I regret that tremendously. Aside from Dave, I'm not sure I've actually seen anyone from Earlham in two and a half years.
36. I typically believe very strongly in politeness and decorum - although less so online than in person. I have been late to appointments because I was holding the door for an unanticipated flood of people. (Vide the opening scenes of the recent Bedazzled remake.) I have also, as it turns out, driven people away with this; they took "uncertain and trying to err on the side of caution" for "creepy".
37. I tend to be attracted to people who are unavailable to me. This isn't causal; it isn't because I'm attracted that they aren't unavailable, and it isn't because they're unavailable that I'm attracted. It just happens that way.
38. During a week-long Internet binge (in 1997), I got off the computer long enough to sit down and watch The Net, with Sandra Bullock. I had to stop halfway through, because not being able to interact with the movie was driving me nuts.
39. I frequently get the impression that I'm not good enough for other people, in many capacities.
40. I frequently wonder if everybody goes through the things that I go through, and just don't talk about them, and have the good graces not to mention it when I talk about them. A large part of this is due to my constantly second-guessing myself, especially in unfamiliar situations. (At the Otakon pre-registration early pickup on Thursday night, there was only one long line for picking up tickets. I was still not entirely convinced that I was in the right place until I actually got to the registration booth. This is how much I second-guess myself.)
41. It's been said that the key characteristic of the successful is that they didn't know it couldn't be done. One of the reasons for my failures is that I tend to enter projects with my subconscious telling me that I can't do this.
42. One of the reasons I truly value my counselor is because she doesn't have any connections to anybody else that I know. I can talk to her about things that I can't tell anyone else because of the nature of social circles. Unfortunately, I still self-censor with my counselor, so some things that I've really needed to say have never been said.
43. I have a secret journal for saying things that I can't say. I haven't updated in six months. To anyone but me, it looks as though I've never updated it.
44. I like to write code, and lately I've been indulging that on the MUSH I frequent. Every so often I have the urge to see if my code is being used. It rarely is. (The exceptions tend to be the code that wasn't originally my idea.)
45. Every day, around 1 PM, I get massively tired, regardless of when I woke up and how much sleep I had the night before. I don't know why this happens. It passes by 2 PM.
46. I'm self-censoring even now, for fear of making people paranoid.
47. The song listed in my journal posts is rarely what's actually playing when I write the entry; I tend to go out of my way to find an appropriate song. I also don't like posting entries without a mood and music listing, so if music isn't playing and there's no background music, I'll open WinAmp to get a song.
48. I try to run a largely public journal. Over the last year, I've had an average of about one friends-only post every ten days, and about three-quarters of those are actually locked to specific people.
49. I don't like yaoi. This has nothing to do with either my sexual preference or my feelings about other sexual preferences; for what it's worth, I'm fairly strongly heterosexual, and I don't rally care what other people do, as long as they don't try to force it on me. This has much to do with both overexposure (everywhere I turn, look, it's yaoi!) and the attitude I encounter with startling frequency that non-heterosexual fiction is somehow better than heterosexual fiction. The fact that I don't like yaoi doesn't make it worse than hetero fic; it just means that it isn't to my tastes. (Also, yaoi just isn't to my tastes.) I also don't like people going out of their way to look for or invent relationships that aren't there in the source material, and I don't like this regardless of the genders of the members of the purported relationship. This is the "Jesus Christ, people" to yaoi's "Oh, no thanks."
<self-censoring>
50. For whatever reason, I really don't like being asked about what I'm working on. "What are you working on?" is fine; "how's [whatever] coming?" isn't. It feels like bugging, to me, no matter how lightly it's meant; and feeling like I'm being bugged makes me not want to work on the project.
51. I am forcing myself (and having to force myself) not to go back and edit what I've written for both clarity and content.
