Unlike chronological order used on the fiction page, all content here appears in reverse chronological order, the same way it appeared first in the log.
utility ¶
My current problem at work in my day job seems well underway, and it's not totally sapping all my attention now, so I should be back to hobby coding. Except I'm thinking too much. I tend to feel any amount of thinking that isn't directly related to making something is thinking too much. However, I know that isn't always true.
Sometimes it's useful to step back and assess context. To my chagrin, I find I almost never do this unless it's forced on me. During all of the 90's, I had many of my most interesting ideas — technical ideas that is — when I was sick with the flu: when I was really sick. I only stopped focusing on current projects when I was too ill to do anything but feel miserable — and let my mind wander. Often then, especially then, I would think of a new and much superior way to handle some problem I'd been doing the conventional way.
So I'm aware of the fact working really diligently all the time is a form of avoiding thought about other things, whether it's intentional or not. (In my late 20's when I had chronic severe sciatic nerve pain from a herniated disk, I found working on technical problems was one of the ways I could ignore pain I'd otherwise find unbearable. If my mind was busy on problems, it took my mind off suffering.)
Anyway, when you keep cranking away at problems that stay around and grow in scope for several years, you can reach a point where your current efforts only pursue goals you established a long time ago. But when diligently chasing progress, you might not notice new goals that might be appropriate if you only paid attention.
Part of my recent slow down in hobby coding was an attempt to ask a question: What am I not noticing?
It's very simple. Now when I pause for a while, I expect to notice new ideas I should work into the mix. Then I go back to my regular schedule with a few changes that aim to fold in new things. This time I snagged my fishing hook on something different, and I can't parse it easily.
Instead of solving technical problems, I've been reviewing conversations — several years worth of conversations — and seeing subtexts involved in ways I never noticed. This is fairly distracting, given a desire to be focused on coding again. Except, was I coding so much in order to avoid seeing this? The answer seems to be, at least partly, yes.
gullible ¶
Since high school I've been told the same thing many times by many different people: "You're the dumbest smart person I know." A friend named Rick in high school was the first to say this, and my eldest son was the last — about a year ago. This remark typically occurs when I don't read enough context into the intentions of others. In particular, because I'm a nice person at heart, I seldom suspect others of ulterior motives, even when they would be transparent to most people, unless I work at it.
Before the age of forty, I was pretty blind to malicious intent unless it was rubbed in my face. This was largely because I never had malicious plans myself, and could not construct a model explaining it or recognizing it in others when it never resonated with anything inside myself. I'm sure you see the problem here. I had "easy pickings" written all over me once you noticed I didn't track trickery.
When my ex divorced me six years ago to go off with my sons' 20-year-old Taekwondo instructor (who is still with her these days) after an affair of many months I failed to notice, I realized I needed to understand how other people worked inside much better than I did. Otherwise I was going to stay clueless about disasters in the brewing, even when they were right in my face. So I gave myself a crash course.
socializing ¶
I moved to the city and started socializing, approaching it like a job, or like learning a foreign language. I decided a full immersion approach might be best. Once I was let go from the job I had then, I had a lot of time on my hands, and enough savings that I didn't need to return to work any time soon. So my full time job for many months was trying to make friends, and I wasn't any good at it, at all.
But I met hundreds of people that way in many social contexts, and had endless conversations, most of which I didn't understand. I mean, I understood what folks said literally, but no one ever said what was really on their minds. Almost all conversations were about some subtext I didn't grasp, which puzzled nearly everyone. No one believed a guy could get as old as I was without learning how the world actually worked. And no one would tell me: it was both embarassing and taboo to each person I asked to explain whatever rules underpinned how singles behaved.
For example, I was unable to get a straight answer when I asked for a definition of the verb to hook up, even when I asked a friend who used it in a sentence — even when that friend was trying to help me, and that verb figured into an explanation of some woman's behavior.
I gave all these conversations my full and undevoted attention. My only goal was to understand what was going on in the social world, from which I had been absent the last twenty-five years I was with my ex. So if you like, you should think of it as an act of memorization: I was recording many hundreds of hours of complex dialog laced with social game playing I didn't understand, so I could review it each night in my mind — and repeatedly over subsequent months as I looked for common threads of patterns.
For the first year I didn't have the first clue about maybe eighty percent of all my social interactions. I had whole evenings that were total mysteries, and I all I could do was pick over them, looking for similarities. I felt like an anthropologist trying to correlate language with cultural and situational behaviors without any clue where to start. In part I was somewhat hampered by the assumption of single-minded self-centered-ness most folks bring to each and every situation: of course people are trying to use you. Isn't that what people are for? To be used?
I hated what I learned when I started to understand. If anything, I hate it more more today, now I understand much better. If I could go back to not understanding, I would do so, because my illusions were much preferable.
I'll spare you early stages of my analysis, in which I teased out bits of social lore you already take for granted as obvious because you did it the easy way as you grew up.
What I really want to talk about is something a bit different: an idea I first read about in the works of Jean Piaget (wikipedia), one of the early pioneers in cognitive development, which I read a lot of at the age of 20. Piaget noticed an interesting thing in his studies of children.
Piaget tested children at varying ages, to see when they typically managed to grasp certain types of basic ideas, such as the notion of conservation (that re-arranging a physical material like clay or water does not change how much of it is present). Sometimes Piaget re-tested them again later, having them look back at experiments they did earlier, before they understood a basic principle behind something.
Piaget noticed something interesting: sometimes children recalled old experiments differently, perceiving them in highsight with new clarity due to recent improvements in understanding. When children looked in episodic memory for what they recalled, they improved the memories with what they were currently able to grasp.
This happens to me now when I recall any conversation I ever had with anyone before five years ago. In all my memories, I now read more into facial expression than I a did a the time. It's a large difference, like night and day.
old movies ¶
I can go back and revisit places and times in my past, like playing an old movie, in maybe only slightly more detail than an average person because my episodic memory is good. And my recall is unusually good for situations when I paid close and continuous attention, like when I made socializing my job for several months after I was divorced.
When I recall those memories of months after divorce now, all of it is a knuckle-biting experience.
There's no part of what I remember that remains a mystery. In fact, it's disturbing how much I can read into situations now that I didn't follow at the time. I had thought I understood them three years ago, but I still didn't even then, not completely. Now I think I do.
It's not like I'm sitting around playing old movies all day long. But when one thing reminds me of another someone said then, when I recall context I'm shocked by sudden grasp now that I lacked then, like being splashed with cold water. WTF?! How was I so clueless?
And the last ten years of my marriage are all like this too, only now I can take it, when as recently as a year ago I couldn't. It's no longer shockingly painful, like getting your toes cut off, like it was two years ago. Now that I've known it a long time, it's less of a surprise, and no longer gives me the shakes. So I can look at the way my life went a little more dispassionately.
But in effect, up until recently, I was unable to review my long term priorities in any thorough way without hitting my inability to process the last ten years of my marriage without my mind running off wherever post traumatic stress makes your mind go. And now that doesn't happen.
There's a scene in the Green Mile where Tom Hanks finally pees without pain after John Coffey heals his urinary track infection, by means of casual miracle (on Youtube, it's the first scene in this clip), after quite some time of very painful life for Tom Hanks' character.
The metaphor I want here is this one: I can now "pee without pain" when I follow my mental process related to technology even when it passes through the final years of my marriage. So I've been thinking more about my coding priorities in hobby projects.
That shouldn't be complex, but apparently it was.
memory contracts ¶
I have an early meeting at work tomorrow, so I must pack it in early tonight. I was asked to help some folks figure out what might have gone wrong when a server I wrote quite a few years ago was ported to a new plug-in architecture — early testing shows too much instability, typically from memory corruption.
I was asked if I could guess what might have caused that. Well, sure. I already know what went wrong. It's always just the one thing, isn't it? :-) All you need to do is get confused about api contracts and free memory while it's still in use — voilá: instant memory corruption.
So I whipped up a short wiki page explaining what could be done to the code in order to find the problems faster. The only reason I'm writing about it now is because there's nothing work-specific about managing memory incorrectly. It's endemic to work in C and C++ unless you're preternaturally careful.
Most of what I said appears in my node demo here: put both magic signatures and generation numbers in every struct whose lifetime has risk of unpredictability, then assert expected values are present continuously. The idea is to die as soon as possible after code corrupts an object.
The main idea is to simulate SEGV crashes you might have when handling memory badly with little physical memory. However, these days in servers with around 4GB of RAM in a 32-bit address space, you can easily have most of your address space be mapped and valid for dereference operations. So, you don't find out about your errors; you just corrupt memory instead.
It's best to lace objects with magic signatures and generation numbers from the get-go, to get feedback all through development on sub-par memory management. Once you realize you're suffering from memory corruption, you can only go back and add checks too late, to catch culprits closer to the act. But there's a new problem.
What if memory ownership contracts are screwed up? You might discover apis are inherently confused, without a clear resolution without dramatic re-design, which is costly. That's the bad bit of news I have to tell them tomorrow: if they added entropy to the system, getting it back out isn't very easy. But you can add draconian checks using tags and generation numbers to catch the entropy fast at runtime. Effect is easy to see; it's cause that gets gnarly.
menu ¶
At lunch today I passed a sign — a banner actually — located on an empty lot which read, "7 legs and 5 thighs $5.99," which immediately suggested a goofy story idea: cannibals. I considered writing a dialog where Wil gives Zé a list of words for a story he makes up on the spot, as a bit of improvisation challenge. Zé would love to get cannibals in a challenge: the more incongruous the better.
In the next block a Pollo Loco appeared on a lot, explaining the banner message with something mundane.
tea bagging ¶
My sons told me a new term used by kids to describe a ritual behavior in video games after defeating a foe: they stand their character atop a fallen foe and rapidly squat up and down in-place. It's called "tea-bagging."
This is done a lot in Halo, which my younger son plays often with friends in large groups of players. When you die in Halo, you see your own dead body for a few seconds afterward before you re-spawn again. Someone who shoots you can take that opportunity to show disrespect (what else to call it?) by tea-bagging your body.
But it only seemed worth writing about when my sons told me gamers had social rules about when you could acceptably tea-bag without being censured in the form of having everyone aim to kill you first. The rule was this: you can only tea-bag someone you killed yourself. If you tea-bag someone killed by another player, you're fair game for concerted attention by all in retaliation.
I just thought this was pretty strange. It's got a kind of funky kick-the-can meets Lord of the Flies flavor to it, plus new-age emergent social behavior aspects.
wireless ¶
Yesterday my ancient wireless access device died (no lights, no nothing) so today I bought another at Fry's. I won't tell you the brand because they really pissed me off.
It works with my high end Mac laptop but it can't be configured from my Mac, even from the web admin UI reached at 192.168.1.1 which refuses to reveal any hint of means to set a secure password closing off open, free access.
I searched high and low in the web admin UI, groveling over every link several times, like searching my house for missing keys one drawer at a time. Nothing.
It came with a friendly CD and numerous warnings that I should configure the device first to prevent others from using it. A helpful sticker over the charging outlet said, "Make sure you run the setup wizard first before using your new toy."
Hey, I'm one of those folks who reads instructions. I popped in the CD and rubbed my hands.
But it was Windows only.
I saw nothing but dead Windows format files and .exe's here and there. Huh. What were my options?
So I had to visit someone with a Windows box to setup my wireless device. The wizard led eventually (apparently after several agonizing timeouts since I was offline) to a view letting me set the security and password desired.
Now it works for me at home, but I assume I can't reset the device without revisiting another Windows machine to reconfigure again to safe working order.
Why should I buy that brand again?
handwriting ¶
These days I rarely write much by hand with pen and paper. I type almost everything. But I used to write a lot in notebooks, and taking notes in school — in college anyway. High school was simple enough to just memorize everything in one go.
When I took notes in college, I often wrote automatically, without thinking about it beyond queueing up an intention to note certain specific details. Otherwise I wrote down every single semantically significant thing a teacher said. Not word for word, mind you, just the gist of what I understood.
I took notes like mad because I was bored out of my mind in college, because with the exception of calculus and physics, usually the pace was only about a third what I could comfortably keep up with at 99% comprehension. Taking notes was how I stayed awake at times — the busy movement helped me keep from nodding off.
I had no problem doing several things at once: listening, refolding to take down as notes, and daydreaming about related topics in the hope I'd associate more things in the future.
My handwriting was small, precise, and regular because I had revamped my writing style several times between grade school and college, going through a phase of experimenting with old-fashioned scripts and calligraphic forms, until finally I settled on something deriving from italic hand as one of the fastest and clearest I could write.
I wrote a lot of notes since I was effectively summarizing entire lectures point by point. My classmates marveled at the volume. I was often asked how I knew what to write down. (Yes, I thought this was very funny.) I told them I wrote down everything and I could just tell what mattered. I suspect they wanted to know how I knew what would be tested, but I didn't care; I wrote for stimulus and not because I needed notes.
Usually I would read the notes once, before each test, as a way of refreshing my memory and giving me a timeline against which to free associate about material that might appear on a test. I might read notes for as much as a hour before a final — another couple hours went into book cramming. I don't think I ever studied more than three hours for a final.
freshman engineering ¶
Talking about handwriting reminded me of a funny story from my freshman year — engineers were required to take a generic class that focused on presentation in engineering drawings and specs. I guess that must have been the class in which I learned how to do orthographic projections and such.
Anyway, early on we were taught a specific way of writing in slanted uppercase block script — generic engineer handwriting approaching how it's done in architecture blueprints, but not quite as elegant. We were told our assignments would be graded according to whether or not we did writeups with agonizingly careful layout and meticulous, perfect handwriting.
Presentation counts, we were told — a lot.
The first big homework assignment of this nature took several times longer to complete than I had expected, mainly because of the exacting effort to write perfectly, drawing each letter just so to fit the professor's standards. Maybe five times as slow as normal careful writing speed. What should have taken 45 minutes took over three hours. I was appalled. I complained bitterly to housemates.
We turned in that assignment, and when they came back, the professor held the stack of assignments in his hand and gave us all a tongue lashing over the horrible job we had done: the presentation was awful and we'd never amount to a hill of beans in the engineering world if we couldn't do a better job of putting together a description of something to be consumed by someone else. It had the feel of a set piece he delivered to every freshman class, but just the same he lambasted us with vigor. We were tiny, insignificant bugs crawling our way up into a professional world. He did his best to shame the class.
He gave us another assignment and emphasized how important it was we do much better, or we were doomed. He said if we didn't understand what he had in mind, we could look at a perfect example, posted on the wall over there by the door: the only A grade in the class. Look at that one, he said — it was exactly what he wanted. Imitate that one.
When class was dismissed, along with the rest of the class, I sheepishly went over to the door to see this paragon of good style. To my surprise, it had my name on it. But I suppose you saw that coming. That was thirty years ago.
figments ¶
Today I saw a flash of Zé holding a floppy periodical titled Cthulhu Magazine today, which immediately suggested a prank he might pull on Ulf. What exactly do I mean by seeing a flash of Zé doing anything? Just a sudden image out of the blue. Some stories are inspired by random images bubbling up from somewhere before I grow them semi purposefully.
I get a fair number of fully formed but simple ideas all the time. Often they occur because I ask a question like "What could go wrong with this design?" Boom: notice this weakness right here? I'm completely used to the fact some of my thinking occurs below my conscious attention, and most of the really interesting parts don't involve any reasoning. Often it happens very fast: between setting eyes on something and having an unprovoked idea about it happens much faster than I could start to form words around a problem. Usually it resembles a bit of pattern matching followed by a few steps of logical analysis, but I only see the end without preliminary ideas.
I find it very interesting my mind does logical analysis when I'm not looking. I can't tease it apart when there's no trace of the process afterward. Presumably there's something running simulations all the time, and I only notice when the result is interesting. I think most people do this in the first moment of laying eyes on a stranger — within a tiny span of time, you suddenly guess a plausible history of attitude and intention fitting what you see so far. (There's research showing how quickly people form opinions of others within seconds.)
Some story ideas are suggested by a sudden random actor-plus-goal image: character so-and-so is trying to do X by way of Y for reason Z, like an arrow in abstract space of purposes, seen in a flash like a quarter second movie trailer fragment.
I told you about this one because it didn't gel into a story. Usually a funny story idea crystallizes right afterward. But not this time. I could ad lib a story fitting that element into it somewhere, but nothing inspired all by itself. I do have a formula for making new ideas appear though. You take two, three, or four odd ideas and consider them together: ask how they relate, and something weirdly interesting might pop into mind. When the ideas weren't that related in the first place, you can trick your mind into confabulating things to fill awkward holes.
bad dates ¶
I was tempted to skip today in mourning for events seven years ago. Then I was tempted to write some kind of brief retrospective since a lot of bad things happened, to me anyway, after that, changing my world view drastically enough that I stopped caring about others for a while.
A lesson I learned — very slowly because the problem was new to me — was how to forget. I didn't have much experience with forgetting, and none at all with problems for which thinking helps not at all. As a geek, you can get comfortable with an idea that thinking never does harm, and often helps. But it turns out that if something bad enough happens, thinking about it can only make you feel sick. (Which puts your mind in a tizzy — another problem — which you might try to handle by thinking more, in a vicious cycle.) If you have the sort of mind where everything is connected fluidly to everything else, a spectacularly bad event turns into a whirlpool of self-inflicting damage. If you never learned to drop problems, you have a bigger problem.
You might not ever have this sort of experience. Or maybe it's just a matter of time before you experience grief of a debilitating nature. So here's a piece of advice you can store away for later. Try to remember this when two things happen: you're processing intense grief, and you're essentially crashing.
Here's the advice: working through it is not going to help. In fact, the more you understand it, the worse it might be. If you can't get from point A at one end to point B on the other side, because in the middle you crash, then trying to get through is not productive, and it's actually going to hurt you a lot to keep trying. I think forgetting is the best bet.
Or if you can't forget, then don't think about it — which is about as hard as it sounds if your native response to problems is to dig in. Learning not to go there might be a challenge. If you're sorta intellectual, then the idea of a forbidden topic might be new territory. If you remember I said this, consider it a good plan to wipe it from your mind as long as possible. You won't actually forget, but you'll eventually wish you could. And there may be things you can't bear to see in movies any longer.
nonsense ¶
In case you can't tell, all of yesterday's story was nonsense. If you assumed any part of it was personal or allegory, you were wrong. I've met a lot of folks who have an odd notion a writer says many things all unaware, as if totally unconscious of nuance in themes. But just as a reader can ask, "What did the author mean by this?" it's equally easy for a writer to ask, "What will a reader conjecture this is intended to mean?"
A lot of the things a reader will consider also crosses the mind of writers, if for no other reason than writers also read a lot and have skills asking what other writers might mean, to guess where things are going, for example.
I usually aim to cause you to open the largest number of questions I can without giving you any means to rule out any of your conjectures. And if X is some proposition, I especially enjoy trying to suggest, imply, argue, or support both X and not X at the same time, because I think that's pretty funny.
In short, you're supposed to see vague possible confirmation of almost any hypothesis that comes to mind, so you can believe that's likely through confirmation bias.
Clearly the most mean-spirited jokes involved CEO simulation Max, and he'll be coming back again later because I think there's a whole lot more to be milked there. However, if you supposed any particular CEO was the one I meant, you're mistaken. For example, I haven't met the CEO of my own company, and have no idea what he looks or sounds like. Nor is it obvious choices — you were intended to hypothesize I might mean Jobs since he's the canonical bad guy some places, and because I mentioned iPods — but that was just to land a joke. Yes, it's true I have worked for at least one top dog in the past deserving of lampoon, but the real target is the entire CEO role since it encourages bad behavior, which apparently the majority of actors have trouble resisting.
I had intended to work the story into something else (which is now still on my todo list, so I can't tell you what it is). And instead it kind of ballooned into a Dilbert style race to the next funny line, so I gave in and let it do that.
I have not actually been screwed by reverse splits, but I've seen them zoom by at such close quarters my hair was whipped by breeze of passage. You were supposed to mistakenly wonder if it reflected an immediately relevant situation. Nope. But I hope young folks look up what that means. And I hope folks hoping to land cheap labor in the future have a harder time selling misplaced assumptions worth nothing. (For example, don't assume I'm unfamiliar with them.)
Can I resist writing a scene at the fund raiser after Zé and Wil successfully log-on to Max from a browser?
fiction impulse ¶
My impulse to write fiction is strong. The really short pieces are fun, and making them related is part of the charm. I greatly enjoy leaving out parts of the context for you to figure out yourself. However, I don't have time to tell stories right now. I shouldn't have written a few close together, creating a rate trend that high. Anything over once a week for a small piece is too much.
I can easily write a couple fun micro-tales every day; making stuff up is easy and it becomes automatic with practice. It's actually slightly easier now to write pages in dialog format: a trend I should not encourage if it greases a slippery slope toward more fiction. Next thing I know I'll start dreaming fiction when I wake up again.
The character named Zé wants to grow a web site around an idea of gathering related micro-tales, using a small group of writers or story tellers who invent related narratives. That's his early thinking; it evolves into something more, revealed only as incidental back-story context in tales.
I've half a vague idea I'll write more fiction eventually, mainly to have something to say when tech stuff gets good enough to make a site that does something besides group posts together on different pages. To my taste most web sites are — not to put too fine a point on it — profoundly stupid in nature. I'd love to find a site that read like one or more novels woven together in an incoherent maze making you wonder what was going on, or what it might mean.
The perfect format — or one of several if possible — would be a set of interrelated serials written without chronological ordering, so reading it would be like turning on the tube and catching part of a series you'd never seen before, but only fifteen minutes at a time, and absent some of the story arc structure. The goal would be to instil a craving to find pieces you assume must exist but have not yet found: raw, unfinished, incomplete, broken, and yet still a bit fun. This is what Zé would like to create. Since I don't have time to do it, I can write about Zé trying to do it instead. (And in the process, something unexpected happens, because of course there has to be a plot with sub-plots.) But I don't have time to do that either: both ironic and to the point.
As an author of software who likes to make authoring tools, I'm really only interested in making software leading to sites where other peope create things, not to consume or buy things. A site where a user of the site can't create participatory content isn't very interesting. But I don't know any sites like this. That's why the industry is so horrifically boring right now. It's about as exciting as a twenty year old strip mall that's about to return to the weeds. The web as we know it devolved to usenet on steroids.
Hmm, I didn't know I was going to write this. I thought it would just be a commentary on writing fiction, and a warning I wanted to write more code and was sorry I gave into the urge to have more fun. Instead, I got an opinion the web sucks (like that's news). Opinions aren't useful, but it does tell you why I don't like your site: nothing happens ... and then you let random bozos post comments, merging all the less salient aspects of pulpit pounding, vanity publications, paid advertisements, traffic accident gawkers, and backfence gossip. Just a big bottom of the barrel social mosh pit. And the thing of it is, I'm afraid we'll look back on this as the glory days: back when net hippies let it all hang out.
Oh look, that's blogger venting, isn't it? Sorry, sorry. I wondered where that stuff came from; now I know.
slower exercise ¶
Now, I realize it's boring to hear me talk about exercise. But in case you try any fitness task soon, consider a slightly different way to exercise: do it more slowly.
When I added back-exercises to my workout, I also started lifting weights more slowly — a lot more slowly. Which makes it quite a bit harder because you're always working, and at every intermediate position besides. I didn't have a specific plan in mind; I was just trying to make it harder, while avoiding total oxygen exhaustion in a longer workout.
Several quite noticeable things have happened with slower workouts, not just a significantly higher metabolism. It's also a lot more aerobic. I can reach the point where I have to stop because I can't breathe quickly or deeply enough anymore (and my oxygen capacity is great now), not because I'm too tired to do another rep. That's kinda weird.
Also, I've gotten noticeably stronger in that short period of time. Muscle tone is much higher. I seem to have bulked up a bit more. I think this and the aerobic effect are both caused by encouraging more slow twitch muscle growth, which also happens to burn more calories than fast twitch muscle during rest periods. I'm naturally high in fast twitch muscle.
(I was a track sprinter in high school, the shorter the distance the better. I was mediocre though, because I didn't train. I think my best time was 10.9 in 100 yards once in gym class, during a period when I wasn't running at all. It doesn't help that my legs are short for my height.)
Slow workouts also seem to do less wear and tear — I have very little recovery afterward, and feel normal the next day. There's very little feeling of muscle repair. My joints don't hurt even slightly.
However, it hurts more doing it — not exactly a surprise when working harder. It just takes more willpower. Slow stomach crunches are nasty, but much more effective.
social gyms ¶
I never have conversations at the gym, but this goes against the grain when many folks apparently go there to socialize. Very clearly, men and women are looking for dates, all the time. It's hard to avoid human interaction, but I manage.
I secretly enjoy snubbing women who come over and go through a kind of display behavior that used to make my last girlfriend upset and anxious; she was a bit jealous. She gave me an earful of analysis on what every single sort of behavioral nuance might mean, making me slightly more clueful.
Fixed staring is one of the stronger signals — if she doesn't look away when you glance in her direction, this means something like, "Come over and talk to me you big dummy." Especially if she keeps staring. I hate that sensation.
(One woman last year batted her eyelashes at me playfully; that doesn't work either. Nothing will induce me to speak first, and that's all that's needed to prevent conversation.)
I avoid meeting folks because I think of them as ... trouble — basically just giant gaping maws of need. Most of the time women are just looking for validation: they want to see how much they appeal to every sort of person, to keep tabs on what the curve looks like, what sort of demand is present in each market segment. (I know this sounds cynical.) No one is looking for someone new, they just prefer to feel wanted. The only way to keep up some forms of self esteem is to feed it a steady trickle of confirmation-bias oriented data.
I guess I sort of plan on never having another relationship, and I act accordingly. Maybe I'll change my mind in ten years, after the financial disaster of divorce five years ago has run its course a bit more; several more years will see me clear.
truth « Þ
