WARNING: Extreme silliness ahead

A few weeks ago, The Xanga Team asked if any of us wanted to be part of the Xanga Product Council. Being an innocent soul, I volunteered. What could be the harm in volunteering an hour of my time to help a website that has given me so much entertainment over the years? Little did I know, however, that I was putting myself in harm's way. A dark force was targeting the Xanga Product Council while we blissfully volunteered our time to help Xanga. Powerful forces too insidious to be named were massing to defeat our merry band of blissful would-be amateur consultants! We never saw it coming...

It began with standard surveillance and intimidation--the usual tools of the Dark Side. Members of the Xanga Product Council were being stalked to try to accuse them of being unworthy of the Xanga Product Council so that they could be replaced by members of the Dark Side. Even blocking could not save innocent Xanga Product Council members from being observed and measured. Even blocking IP won't turn away such a determined stalker. Yet the Xanga Product Council stood strong, unwilling to kick out members even under such intimidating tactics. Much like Chamberlain in '38, appeasement was attempted, and failed miserably.

This dark force could not be thwarted by appeasement. Some members of the Xanga Product Council spoke courageously of a Front Page whose content wouldn't just be dependent on who begged for the most comments and recs. The very thought horrified the Dark Side. Those of us on the XPC WERE THREATENED WITH DEATH. Your Xanga Product Council could at any moment be dragged from their homes and burned at the stake for their beliefs! We tremble in fear at our soon-coming doom. We've committed the mortal sin of not having all the same opinions as Xanga users from 3 years ago. As everyone knows, the right way to get new customers is to ignore current trends and focus on old customers.

Naturally, I beg for you to stand with us as we undertake this brave new world. Stand for truth, justice, and Xanga improvement! Don't fall for the Dark Side's attempts to vilify the Xanga Product Council. Or at least, make a cool movie about us if we perish that makes us seem twice as cool as we really are. I wonder if Ben Affleck is busy...

Do you think people like you more for what you do or for who you are?

Suppose that you're in a car full of friends. You have an hour and a half before watching the movie, and need to find somewhere to go eat. No one really has a strong idea of where to go, but Tom pipes up "McDonalds! I want a McFlurry!" He's bizarrely excited about this, and talks about how much he likes a McFlurry and how he never got to get one when he was little. You really don't care for McDonalds, but you're in a relaxed mood and don't want to get in a fight about it.

Fast forward to McDonalds, where all of you except Tom look at each other with disappointed looks. "How did we get here?" you think to yourself. The fact is, Tom was so passionate, that no one felt brave enough or inspired enough to disagree with him. And so you sit there, picking at your wilted McSalad, wondering how you got yourself into this.

Lately I've been annoyed at how specialist interests are becoming so dominant in America. Fact is, we've all just become so lazy and so "nice" (quotation marks intentional and facetious), no one wants to seem like the bad guy. So we continue to allow each special interest to push for its pet cause, until the country ends up with a lot of palatable solutions. There just doesn't seem to be any way to stop this trend in a democracy. Is there any hope, or are we doomed to be yanked around by each inspired demagogue and biased industry in turn?

9/26/11 Not-so-oblique update: the man accused of the crime decided to fix things by killing himself. I don't know what to say. I wish I had reached out to him now.

Ah, I'm going to break my rule and blog very obliquely about a real life situation. Recently, an acquaintance here was arrested for a crime. The crime was heinous. I find it interesting just how powerless I feel in this situation. If it were an illness of the body, I could send him a nice card, shoot a polite email, pray for him. But for this man, the sickness is deep within his soul, sigh, poisoning his thoughts, twisting him towards the unthinkable, turning a man I knew to be funny and friendly into an animal.

Somehow I don't think Hallmark carries any cards that say Get Well Soon...Preferably Before Prison. I never really thought about how the family of an accused individual (guilty or not) feels. Can there be any more lonely spot than being the family of the accused? You might as well have leprosy. "Sorry about the arsonist, Mrs. Jones. Gus always seemed like the one most likely to do it, who would have known it were Jason?" "Hey, Joe, shame about your brother being a hit-and-run driver. Guess we should have known he had a problem with taking responsibility when he wouldn't pay his poker debts!"

Gallows humor, I know, and I apologize for this whole post. In some ways, I feel guilt for my strange sympathy for the criminal. But it's hitting home with odd force...perhaps because I'm reminded yet again of the staggering amount of evil hidden behind many a smiling face. I promise daisies, unicorns, and rainbows next time.

So I was going to make a post about dating and whether nice girls really do finish last and some other random topics. I used to love to ramble about such topics when I first had Xanga. However, I kind of realized something. As I was trying to write it, I kept remembering various nice girls I had interacted with and all the things they had done wrong and right in trying to date guys named me and guys not named me. I found myself so busy thinking of what actually had happened that I couldn't actually write the post.

I'm an odd blogger in that I really don't like writing about what actually happened. Maybe my head is in the clouds, or maybe I'd rather idealize my life than report the details. But I prefer being able to have some distance from my topic. I once tried to write honestly and exactly about my dating life, in a blog far far away, and it never really went anywhere.

In the end, maybe I just won't have any more posts to write about dating. It was fun to write about dating when I wasn't dating. But now that I am doing more of it and enjoying it less, if you will, it's just not the same. It's too bad, but interests change over time, I suppose.

Work can be...like a frustrating exercise in mountain-climbing. You tell yourself "Keep pushing, you're almost to the top, it's down-hill from here!" and then you find yourself wanting to take a nap about 100 yards from the top. Then when you get to the top, you find that there's actually a LARGER mountain behind it that you have to climb.

Being fat can be...like having a spare bedroom filled with clutter...sure, you could do some cool things if that bedroom was clean, but you don't really NEED that spare bedroom, and you just shut the door when company comes over. About the only time you really want to clean it is when someone else makes you feel guilty about it.

Dating can be...like waiting for rain to hit your lawn. You really don't want your grass to die, and you will water it if you have to. But you keep on putting it off, hoping for the best, and knowing that one day your grass will be dead and you wish you had done something about it sooner.

Family can be...like having a guard dog in your house. He's big and cumbersome and sure he has a bad habit of taking a dump in the wrong places. But when it's 3AM and you hear an odd sound outside, you really wish they were around and you forget the little things.

It can be...your turn. What analogy or metaphor runs through your head?

“It’s like you’ve grown up, and you were left a songbook. And you knew it was important, but there was no one you could talk to about the songbook. The songbook didn’t have the music, it just had the words. So you took your best guess on how to sing “Adrift in Atrium” “By the Waters of Kenzia” and all these songs no one ever heard of, and you sung them to yourself until you thought you had the right tune, but really, there’s no way of knowing. “From the Side of the Mountain” is a beautiful song to read, but to sing…is it “From the” or “FROM the” or…

And then you’re in the coffee shop in yet another town, like so many times before, and you step out, and you hear a voice singing “By the Waters of Kenzia”, and you don’t even recognize it, it’s been so long since you’ve sung it, and you feel your body shake before you even realize why it’s shaking. And you sneak up on the voice, and it sounds just like you always thought it should, but it pronounces it “KEN-zia” not “Ken-zee-uh” and you feel that the voice is right, that’s how it goes. And you can’t find the voice yet, but you wait, and it starts singing “From the Side of the Mountain”, and you want to cry and laugh the whole time, it was “FROM the”, you always knew it was, it was! And finally you can contain yourself no longer, and you belt out the chorus with the voice, and the voice quiets at first but sings ever stronger, and you both stumble through the song, finding the right notes together, until on the third and final verse you thunder through the chorus together. And you sing so loudly you never hear the footsteps coming down the steps, but you do feel the arms around you, but you can’t stop looking up at the bright night sky and weeping with joy, grasping the hands that encircle your waist as an excited voice says “You know it too! You know the Songbook!”…”

(Old post).

I was reading the blog of an Internet activist the other day. This fellow had great blogs back in the day on some very important topics, with rich information that I hadn't heard before. He was a strong voice for his cause, and I respected him highly. However, his latest blog entry confirmed my suspicions on how well trying to be an advocate for a cause, or even 1-1 ministry, works on the Internet.

I've tried my hand at some Internet advocacy over the years. It's been everything from trying to get people to like my favorite sports team to actual counseling of people in distress. And to be honest, it's rare that an Internet site or even a well-meaning Internet person will change someone's mind about things. Even when it's super-obvious (Gee, I don't know, Susan, maybe you shouldn't go back to the ugly guy who beat you black and blue, and maybe you should go back to medical school instead, etc.), it still can be a huge battle. I think we've all tried to help one Xangan friend or another who fell on hard times...and found it to be surprisingly difficult.

When one's efforts at helping or teaching fail, it's easy to point fingers. Blame the people who didn't learn, call them too dumb or unenlightened to bask in your wisdom. Or blame yourself. If only you had been available 24/7 instead of 23/6, you could have saved Joe from that awful, awful drug habit! It's your fault!!!

I think it's more realistic just to realize that you don't have much time to affect someone's life if they only have contact with you online. It's too bad, mind you; I know some Xangans tried really hard to love, serve, and teach people, and were very disappointed when it didn't work out well. But it is what it is. Can any of you point to a time where a Xangan truly changed your mind and heart through what they wrote or said? I can give some credit to some of the first Xangans I met, but very, very few. Do you really think it's possible to change and help people via the Internet? Or is it as hard as I think it is, and not worth trying?

I have a bad relational habit that I can't seem to shake. Whenever I meet a woman who I might be interested in dating, I can't help but ask her about her job. Trust me, nothing is more romantic than demanding that a woman tell you the challenges and joys of intellectual property law. It's hilarious, and I'm to the point where I somewhat enjoy the slight look of panic as the woman wonders if we will ever progress to talking about how lovely her dress is because I SPENT 45 MINUTES TRYING TO FIND SOMETHING THAT PROPERLY SET OFF MY EYES, GREEK, AND YOU SHOULD NOTICE.

While acknowledging that classy women don't like to talk about work on the first date (rim shot!), I still can't resist this line of questioning. Work, by its very nature, tends to define us. I am who I am because of my training and labor. It has left unavoidable imprints on the way I think, act, and breathe. If I am going to be living with someone, I will be dramatically affected by their job. I remember when I roomed with my brother, who was a nurse. He would work crazy shifts and have fantastic stories about absurd patients and silly co-workers...while I, Mr. Desk Job, would tell him about my Excel spreadsheet or "This one blog entry I read." Yeah, after a while, we didn't talk much about our days anymore. I wonder why? heh.

There are certainly lots of fun comments to be made about how men tend to be obsessed with doing while women tend to be obsessed with being. ("What you do" vs. "Who you are, and in relation to who else"). And I'd make them...on a day when I'm not still at my office at 9PM, working on yet another project that isn't quite done, while wondering why this happens so often. Xanga is my work refuge when I can't stand to look at another table or graph, so here I flee to read something lighthearted like "My girlfriend left me and I am living under a bridge" before going back to work again. Yeah, can we have more happy posts, btw?

But anyway, the bottom line is, before committing to someone, know what they do, not just who they are. A bad work environment or unhappy employee will turn even the friendliest person into an annoying grouch. And given that I'm not the friendliest person to begin with and I'm still at the office, well...(wry grin)...I'm done writing this post and have nothing else to say.

I've been thinking about this phrase lately. I met an old acquaintance a few days ago who frequented a forum I wrote on a lot in the late 90's. He told me I taught him a lot and enjoyed my writing there. But also, I remembered how long it took me to quit that particular forum. How I stayed there when I should have done something different, just because I was used to it and there was no big reason to quit.

I'd like to change my life around so that I quit when I'm ahead. Imagine being able to end relationships when they are just mediocre, not utterly soul-sucking, or switching jobs when you realize that you are not motivated, not when you are fighting depression and wishing for an exit. That would be a lot better, right? Oh, to quit while still being ahead, before you pay a dear price and have no choice when to quit. Yes, quitting with options has its own problems. One can quit too early and miss out on something good. But sometimes it's not quitting, it's fleeing for something better.

Thoughts?