Ponderances of a madman….

The more I think about it, the more I think Meredith is right about her comment about me “selling myself”. Yeah, it’s a compensation thing – I feel inadequate at life at the moment, so I try to be what I’m selling myself as. Aw heck, just be me. Fuck everyone else 🙂 Fuck everyone else is what I used to be at one time, now, well, not so much. I’m currious if I can change that back to what it should be (I for one would love to own a T-Shirt that says “Fuck You” on it, and anytime I think someone is turning their nose up at me because me not having a lot of cash, or a house, or a nice car, just go “Ahem!” and point at my shirt 🙂 Yep, a nice black shirt with Fuck You in big white letters :-) 

But that’s still only half of the story – she mentioned vulnerability (and so did Heather), and that’s something I don’t really do well. It’s something in my basic nature – I don’t like to put myself in a state where I think others can hurt me. So telling someone what it is that I’m bad at / hurt by / etc. tends to be avoided at all costs. Hrm.

When it comes to my “do whatever you want” attitude… I think she’s half right. I started thinking about it in context of some old fights between Heather and I. And, um – damn, something finally clicked in. Heather associated that permissiveness of mine with me not caring. I don’t nessisarily want to change the accepting and persmissive nature I have – but she pointed out where she felt the line should be, and I agree with her. I was way too willing to just say “ok, fuck it, go ahead and move to Colorado” when Heather wanted to. Even though I was pretty upset internally, and unsure that it was truely a good thing for us. What should have happened was that I ballsed up and said “Waddaminute here… I understand what you feel you need, but this is going to damage US.” So, yeah, if it’s something that’s going to damage the relationship, then I better damned well stand up and speak my bit. 

One of the other things she mentioned was I really needed to get rid of that white horse I like to ride in on to save the day 🙂 Ok, the whole save the day thing too. I agree with her in principal – that HAS gotten me in trouble before, and it’s such and obvious thing for a manipulative person to play on (and trust me, it’s been done.) But I’m not so sure I really want to give that one up. It’s a pretty basic thing for me – “Me Hero, you Damsel In Distress, Me save you.” Yeah, there’s no real sanity there 🙂 But lets face it – that’s one of those little drama things there that I do enjoy. The best policy, IMO, just bloody well restrict who I’ll take the white horse outta the stall for 🙂

Now, the last time there was an opportunity to don the armor and ride, I didn’t. Oh, I WANTED to, trust me. But an amazing thing happened – the universe managed to coordinate events in such a way as to prevent me from doing a damned thing to help in person. And when I wasn’t able to do anything about it, well, I was able to see it a little more logical about things and realized, well, if I did try and get in the middle of things I was gonna cause an amazing shit storm. Having the opportunity to NOT do the usual thing allowed me to question my usual practices anyway (well, not that there’s much “usual” about it anymore – not sure when the last time I donned my now very rusty armor) – it’s perfectly OK to try and save the day. Just stop and look to see if what you wanna do to help is gonna cause more problems than you set out to solve. As it was, a couple of phone calls later, I had two stand ins to do the job instead (and as it turned out, they weren’t nessisary either.)

Ya know, when it comes to the vulnerability thing, I have had moments where I’ve just completely put myself out there, and haven’t really had that good of results 🙂 I can remember being completely ga-ga over Meredith at one time and chasing her for like, I dunno – a damned long time. I told her how I felt… and, well, in the end it didn’t turn out that well. Telling someone something like that moves it from one level of vulnerability to an entirely new level of it – it’s one thing if the other person doesn’t know, it’s totally different when you KNOW that they know! 🙂 It’s like having a bum knee, and telling the fighter that you just entered an Ultimate Fighting Championship match with “Hey, ya know, my knee’s been acting up lately…” It can drive ya nerotic 🙂 (Meredith made a comment a while back about love not having treated me too well – truth is, I still don’t really see it that way. Yes, I have a marrage that failed, and well, I feel richer because of it. I chased Meredith around and my heart took a bit of a beating for a bit, but, I ended up with a great friend because of it. It’s all a matter of perspective, and if you want to look at things from the “short term” view or the “long term” view – long term, things turned out just fine. They almost always do!) 

But at the same time… if you care about a person, then you probably should let yourself be vulnerable to them. To put a degree of trust into ’em and let them know ya got a bum knee, or that you’re in love with ’em, or that your jealous, or whatever. Yeah, sure, they COULD kick ya in the knee – but they probably won’t 🙂

Lazy Bastard Night 🙂

So, I’m lacking a piece of software to finish one of my projects, and I’m picking it up tomorrow night. I still don’t have my camera back from a friends house, so I can’t work on that. I needed more info for a web project. Hrm.

So, I set all night and played with my phone again. Ok, that’s becoming a bit of an addiction – making my phone do EXACTLY what I want it to do.

The whole thing with forwarding mail from my Mac to my phone works ok, though when I send mail back from my phone it gets spam-trapped. I’ve got away around that if I can spend a little time writing a couple of Apple Script routines. Which means I probably will never fix it 🙂

But I did create a new form of self-torture in this process 🙂 For some reason, I thought “Hey, when someone sends me a message on MySpace, I’ll just forward that too!” Except… it doesn’t forward the message that someone gave ya. It forwards a message that you HAVE a message. Uh, hm. (oh, and forward 6 different friend requests by spammers too) I’ve been wondering what was up with a friend o’ mine – haven’t heard from her most of the week, and last week was kinda odd too. The message saying you have a message tells you who the message was from… and of course, about 2 hours before I’m due to get off from work she left me a message on MySpace, which my phone promptly told me about. I just looked at the phone and laughed – two hours until I can stop and check my messages and see what was going on 🙂

R&S Mystery…

On Monday my sidekick that I hired called in sick – he had been up late partying (till 4 AM) and was too hung over to work. Ouch. But, hey, no biggie. The next day I stop by to pick him up, and his GF says he’s not there. I called later, and he hadn’t showed up. Now, at this point, the mother fucker is fired – “No Show + No Call = No Job” is the rule with me unless you can come up with a damned good reason.

Today a friend of his (who actually had recommended him for the job) stopped by asking if I had seen Jason. Not only had he not seen him, his GF still hasn’t seen him either. HMMM. 

I’ve got a replacement worker who’s not nearly as good, but I gotta say I’m a bit concerned. Anyone who’ll call in sick and tell me point blank it’s a hangover isn’t the type to do the nocall / noshow thing. And where the other people around him haven’t seen him either, that’s just plain odd.

What in bloody hell – more work?!

I talked with one of my contracts today, and they asked if I knew PICs very well – sure, we did a couple of flour mill simulations using it (which means they were pretty damned large simulations). And so they offered me more work (and yet again asked it I’d just to go to work for them directly. WTF – why make LESS money when they already have a continuous stream of work for me right now? 🙂 I told them I wasn’t going to currently accept the project until I could get on top of some of the current work I have. But I’ve got a meeting with them on Tuesday to find out the schedules for the next 3 projects that I have with them. 

So my current paying gig list:

Build R&S BBQ #1 (Almost complete), then #2 a month or so later

Spirit Project #1

Kenosha, WI (April 9)

Spirit Project #2, #3, & #4

Talifer Farms website

Talifer Farms video

And my “doesn’t pay now, but pays me later” projects:

Movie #1 Script / Production

Helping someone else setup a web based business

Helping a group setup an adult movie business

Hrm. This is turning out to be a good year now, but damn – I’ve got to re-arrange things so I can get on all of this a bit better. This does make me feel like I might really be able to pull off my goals for the year.

Webcomics

I have a serious webcomic addiction. I use Darkgate Comic Slurper and set up an RSS feed in Bloglines so I get all of them. Ok, not EVERY webcomic, but around 70 are on my list that I scan through every day at some point. Every once in a while I see one that just stands out as a unique combination of strange and funny. Typically that’s from Penny Arcade. Todays was a WTF sorta thing that made me laugh like hell 🙂