Epic Banality

Every time a car dies I try and diagnose it myself before it goes to a mechanic in hopes that I can fix it or convince myself the problem is minor up until I get the call from my mechanic saying, “Yeah, I hope you have good credit.” When my car failed to start the other day, I did the same thing. This time, however, it wasn’t some vain hope.

With the help of one of my mom’s friends we diagnosed some sensors as being the problem and, even better, they didn’t need to be replaced. They just needed some cleaning. So, good news there.

Tonight I was talking about a certain college quarterback whose current misfortune amuses me greatly. Once I’d completed my usual snide and sarcastic ridicule of his broken foot, my dad made a strange comment; he said, “Well, some people don’t fear God. I do.” I pressed him for the relevance and we talked, but I couldn’t help but feel the comment was directed at me. Mind you, it may not have been and it could be my own paranoia talking, but regardless, it got me thinking about today.

Had today happened a year ago, I would have started madly analyzing my life trying to figure out what was wrong with me or I would have simply singled out things that I felt were less than stellar about my religious life and presumed they were the reason God was punishing me. It’s strange, but while I’ve always felt God was an extremely distant figure in terms of things like listening to my prayers, I’ve always felt as if He was very close in terms of exacting punishment on me. Don’t ask me why because I don’t understand why I’ve felt that way. While I was raised religious, the concept of the vengeful and/or jealous god was anything but ingrained in my teachings. It probably has something to do with my own vicious and judgmental nature as well as how brutally critical I’ve always been of myself.

Thanks to the current recession—especially in the real estate market in Nevada—work has dried up which is the cause of considerable stress. I’m certainly not alone in this regard and I’m sure I’ll pull through. I always have. Today added insult to injury though. My car failed to start. (Actually, it starts fine, it just dies right after that.) It’s extra stress at a time when I don’t need nor want the pressure, but you know what? Shit happens. It happens to every one. Once it happens, you either have to deal with it or run from it or whatever. I’m annoyed and it sucks. Case closed.

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I’ve been in a number of relationships over the course of my 28 years—about 10 of which have been spent inside the confines of a romantic affair. During the course of such things, I’ve been called by many terms of endearment and been described in many ways. Before K.L. I would describe most of these as traditional. There was honey and dear and even darling from time to time. I was cute and I was a dork. I was a lot of things, some so dripping with sap it makes me sick to think about them. Even the worst of those were still variations on what most people would consider typical.

The rules have changed.

Once I was sweetie and now I am… catfish. That’s right, catfish. Why? Apparently, when I lay down, I’m like a catfish at the bottom of a river or a lake or something similar. That is, of course, unless I’m laying on top of K.L. in some manner at which time I become “like a cod” instead since codfish swim higher than catfish typically do. My back is like a fish fillet or something like that. I don’t really know since I make little attempt to make sense of K.L.’s statements on this subject.

The fun doesn’t stop there. Various parts of my body have their own comparisons that have nothing to do with anything fishy. In fact, it’s generally poultry of some sort. My hands are like chicken wings as are my arms as a whole. My finger tips escape the chicken theme and are regarded as grapes. I also seem to have a pair of turkey legs too. There was also one occasion where I was described as looking like a cow when I had my head looking over a pillow at her.

This isn’t normal. This isn’t to say I’m in search of normal but K.L., as always, insists that anything she does is typical and that there are probably many other people out there that share in her particular eccentricities. There aren’t, and I mean to say that definitively.

I’ve recently been bit by the writing bug, although I have a feeling those that have been reading around here would think otherwise given that I’ve said nothing for over a week. I’ve been writing elsewhere though. Last night and this morning I began work on a section of a greater essay, a political treatise of sorts, concerning voting which is what has spawned today’s rant.

It started like my normal writing sessions on political topics generally do. I go through some of my notes, read quotes, write a little bit and then generally decide to do some additional research to put my mind in gear and find a few other historical points and authorities for whatever it is I happen to be compiling. While I have a small library of quotes and references on some subjects—liberty, the right to bear arms, the evils of the consolidation of wealth and corporate power—voting is a subject I have very little on. I tried some Google searches which turned up nothing. So, I decided to plug in a portion of a quote I did have to see if I could find a collection of similar statements. That’s where things became very messy. Here’s the quote:

Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end to it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level. — John Adams

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Today marked the last symbolic step in finalizing what I am calling my “trial separation” from religion. It’s been a long and complicated road the last few years, where I’ve struggled much more with the concept than I had as a child or teenager. However, this year finally did it for me. There wasn’t any particular event, but most people out there have a threshold for the amount of guilt and disappointment that they’re willing to tolerate. Furthermore, people who value things like reason and logic tend to have a similar threshold for the amount of arbitrary ceremony that they can stand. My thresholds have all be crossed I guess.

So what was my symbolic step? I went underwear shopping today and for the first time in about six years I’m wearing something other than white underwear; it’s red right now, for those of you who are curious. I purchased an array of colors: greens, blues, the red pair and some gray and black. No white though, not a one.

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For the past few years, the bread and butter of my web development career—presuming that you could call it a career anyway—has been PHP coding. I know a lot of so-called “real programmers” will boo and hiss and whatever, but it’s served me well enough. When I made my initial exodus from ASP in 2000, PHP was a breath of fresh air. I preferred the syntax to that of ASP (and I was one of those “mavericks” coding it in JScript and not VBScript because I hace class) plus it was free and ran on my home grown Linux server. Those were good days.

In the past eight years, I’ve done more programming and gotten better at it. Some of my projects have been larger in scale and PHP becomes much less fun to work with. I’ve been working with Python in my free time and really like the Django. In fact, if any of you out there are fledgling programmers and are looking for a place to start, I can’t help but recommend Learning Python by Mark Lutz. Python has a lot of good free tools, runs on many platforms and this book is very, very good in my opinion—not just as a primer on Python itself, but on beginning programming in general. I even picked up a few things from it. (And, if you’re a Monty Python buff, you get a bunch of extra bonuses.) I much preferred to Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas.

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There were a number of occasions where I started rolling out my own blog software and wrote one or two entries to fill space and left them at that. Some of them I actually liked so, as I putter along with this thing I’ll publish a few so I don’t ultimately lose the text. Any post designated “B-side” is an old post from another time and another place. This one, A Peak at the Past was originally written on October 3rd of 2007. I was experimenting with Drupal at the time. Anyway, here’s the entry:

Aside from working on the server and playing around with this site, I did quite a bit of reading over the weekend and even some today and the day before. There are a few things I’d like to write about concerning American history and some political concepts but before I got to that I felt like I had to do some more research. Voting and juries were the two main issues. While I won’t be getting deep into those right now, there are some things of interest I wanted to jot down.

Voting in Early America is a nice article with a few very choice quotes covering the basic history of voting in, you guessed it, early America. It’s not terribly long and I suggest that everyone take the time to read it. Benjamin Franklin’s remarks alone are worth the price of admission. If you haven’t studied very much in the way of American History, you’ll probably find this article even more interesting than I did.

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I suffer from some strange compulsions. There are the simple ones, like the fact that all the cash in my wallet must be sorted by denomination and series date and if I see some change sitting on a table or a counter I feel the need to arrange it in an orderly fashion. When I eat at In’n Out Burger I have two hamburgers—no cheese—and some fries and consume them thusly: burger, fries, burger. It must be this way. I generally like symmetry and order and my family has categorized me as “anal” since middle school. There are also the more annoying ones, like the resulting problem with the table IDs in Wordpress and the mess and hell that is the newest version (2.6).

Wordpress 2.6 introduced something that, at first, seemed like a damn cool feature: it keeps track of revisions. Every time I change a post it keeps a history of the changes. Cool, very cool. That is, until you combine it with their auto save feature and the fact that it’s just not a very well thought out system. It could be—and I hope they do something about it—but for now it grates on my compulsion for tidiness in data.

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Every Wednesday the gang—which generally includes Guinness, Voltron, Hotelie, Soldier and K.L.—and I head to our favorite pub, Fadó for some drinks, dinner and a furious round of pub quiz. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, people form teams at their respective tables and compete for a number of rounds of trivial. At the end of the night the team with the most points wins some kind of award. At Fadó first place gets a $50.00 gift certificate and there are prizes for second and third as well. We’ve been at this “traditionally” for about six or seven weeks. We’ve never managed to win and even when we’re in the race, the last round always proves fatal. In the last round the points are doubled and we always seem to fare poorly.

Tonight was different. Tonight, even though it required some morally flexible means, we emerged victorious. The night began with naming our team which is given a theme each time. The theme for tonight was a made up 80s dance move. We thought that “The Blumpkin” had a nice ring to it. Over the course of the match we answered the questions pretty well, but for that extra added push in the last round we effectively bribed one of the waitresses for the answers. (She was a hot waitress according to K.L., and I have to agree. Incidentally, so does Guinness.) Also, I stole one answer (the number of stars on the Australian flag) from K.L.’s Blackberry. So, we’ve got unclean hands now. We also have a $50.00 gift certificate.

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I know there are is some kind of prevailing idea that maligning someone who has recently died is tacky, but I have to say, when someone dies in a way that’s all too fitting for their lifestyle or position, I just can’t help it. If this person has worked for the current White House administration then it’s worth bonus points.

Tony Snow died today. It was colon cancer that got him. All I could do was laugh when I read the headline this morning and exclaim out loud to my monitor, “Well Tony, that’s what happens to a man when he’s completely full of shit!” I realize that’s not a universal truth since the entire administration and everyone working for Fox News would be being radiated in a cancer ward somewhere, but still it’s nice when the grim reaper claims someone in a way that’s all too fitting. If only Dick Cheney could drown in a drum of crude oil. (For the record, I’m aware of the fact he’d been dealing with cancer for a long time, in fact I exclaimed the same thing when I first heard about it.)

Anyway, good riddance. One less Washington DC politician, one less media jack off, one less Republican and one less conservative.