ONE MORE AND THEN I WILL GET TO WHAT I SUPPOSED TO HAVE DONE THREE HOURS AGO...

     OKCupid is doing a Christmas-themed gimmick sending me "12 Matches of Christmas"...one per day for twelve days. I was stunned...stunned I tells ya, that this site for the first time actually recommended someone for me whom I am interested in meeting, immediately attracted to, and within distance of - the trifecta. Usually I have found such women through my own searches. She's also the first woman on this site in my five months of being on it who made me go, "Whoa..." Thank goodness I liked her profile too :-)

There's no ID so it's okay to post this, right? :-P

      I hate when I'm put in a position where I would actually be saddened, even if only somewhat, should she not respond to my message cuz, well...goddamn. I need some good news because I am clearly very attracted to Number Twelve and I know I shouldn't be because despite the present benefit of her pulling me away ever so gently from Digby, it will come at the ultimate price of emotional doom. It grows inside me, manifesting as an evil* patience this time. Some days I really hate that my Heart is so patient. My Heart is entirely unable to understand that I will one day grow old and die. So...fingers crossed :-)


ADDENDUM: She did not respond to my message.

________________________________________
* I tend to use "evil" as a synonym for the kind of selfishness which requires the suffering/sadness of another in order for me to be happy. I have trouble accepting that a good relationship can be born of knowingly desiring to benefit from the misfortune of another. In this example, it would be one thing to ask out a girl who's single because her singledom is innocent from your perspective, but to wait for a girl's relationship to sour and end like a kind of vulture before making a move seems inherently wrong. I'm not explaining it well, but I'm hoping you get the point.

WHAT HANDWRITING IS THIS

     I overkern my handwriting...sometimes to the point of no spacing at all between the letters in the words I'm writing in manuscript. I checked out The Complete Idiot's Guide to Handwriting Analysis to see what it meant. The booklet offers this explanation:

Letters crammed together reveal an impetuous person who rushes to judgment and overreacts. Impulsive and often confused about what she feels and what others feel, her need to fit in with a social group can push her to behaving inappropriately. She desperately wants acceptance, so she'll do anything she thinks will help her fit in. This is the type of person who will give in to either internal emotional pressures or external peer pressure.

Besides the suggestion that I may not have been the target audience of this booklet, I wonder what it says about me when the handwriting sample offered comes from the "killer mom" Susan Smith. Except for her letter Ws and Vs (which are pointy whereas mine tend to be rounded) and her Ys (which are pointy whereas mine are rounded), her handwriting is also very similar to mine. Very familiar looking though actually reading this booklet would be necessary to further analyze my handwriting. For example, what does it mean my obsessive need to connect letters in a word? I do this in an alphabet I created in school as well and it was never designed with cursive handwriting in mind.What do my excessive loops on my Gs mean or the fact that in my hurried writing, they look like Ss that dip below the line? Fun, grain-of-salt stuff :-)

      My narrow word-spacing also suggests that I have "an extreme need to surround herself with other people" and that "[l]ike a puppy always on the heels of whoever walks into the room, she needs constant attention and approval. She acts purely on instinct. Without continual reassurance from others she gets anxious, and the moment she's not getting attention, her self-esteem plunges." My line-spacing cannot be judged because I wrote my sample on ruled paper which is a no-no for overall handwriting analysis.

      Later in the booklet, they go back to Susan Smith's writing and describe it as having a "weak drive" and that her writing "just sits on the page, unsure and depressed" as opposed to the counterexample of Dean Koontz's "vigorous writing" revealing a "strong drive" and "stamina and enthusiasm for life".

      Caveat lector...

HEY! IT'S A CHRISTMAS-THEMED ENTRY...

      I think quite possibly the dumbest gift one could give to someone is a credit card sponsored gift card. Actually, I despise all gift cards as gifts for two main reasons. One, you're trading good money in for what amounts to irredeemable "fun money" and irredeemable in the sense that once your money has been transmuted into gift card form, it will not be returned...even trivial amounts like a few cents. Even on paper food stamps, you still got real money for any part of the change which was less than a dollar. And two...the sheer sad obligation it represents. It would seem better to receive nothing at all than to get what a gift card represents which is the gift-giver's admission that s/he knows not enough about you to buy you a gift with even the hint of the personal touch that a real gift carries. But whatever...one can rationalize store-sponsored gift cards somewhat, but I cannot rationalize the credit card sponsored ones for one simple reason:

      Activation fee. The $25, $50, and $100 gift cards come with a one-time $3.95 activation fee for the $25 card going up in one dollar increments for each successive version. The intention behind these gift cards is that "They can be used anywhere Visa/MasterCard/American Express are accepted." Yes, that's the lure...but you're paying money for money. How idiotic is that?

--- Hey honey! I just spent $28.95 on $25 for you!

--- Aw, you shouldn't have! No, really...you shouldn't have.

SOMETHING TO REMEMBER

      My nose is never not stuffy. I don't think I've breathed clearly since I was in high school. I saw this post by Current-C on Reddit offering a temporary solution. I tried it and it does do as advertised. I'm on the verge and have probably already crossed the line for having another sneezing fit. I do breathe through my mouth a lot. I imagine it has been exacerbating the problem. Even breathing through my nose-only these past couple of minutes feels like a mild suffocation. Yeah, it's that bad. But doing this does temporarily open the sinuses. I've noticed that terror does cause the body to reprioritize :-)

Do this now: Hold your breath until just before it starts to really become uncomfortable. Then slowly take a couple shallow breaths, preferably through the nose, then hold your breath again. Did your sinuses open up? If not repeat the above, only try to hold your breath a little longer. After this you should be able to breath easily through your nose. You should only breathe through your mouth when speaking.

      If I avoid this bout of non-allergic rhinitis (which I can only conclude I have since I have not been able to pinpoint an allergy to anything over the years), then I will have to remember this technique of holding your breath until your body genuinely starts to fear for itself causing it to release its stranglehold on your airways. And no, taking anti-histamines is a no-go because they make me drowsy to the point of being non-functional and I'm not a fan of having to take a medication for weeks-on-end because it doesn't tell me if it's working as advertised. If the drug alleviates allergy symptoms, it should work when I take it for the current spell. I remember the allergist I used to see giving me Nasonex to try. I didn't want to use it until I had an attack to test it. Turns out I would go almost a full year before my next attack so what if I had been taking it? Would we have incorrectly concluded that the medication had been working and that my one attack was an anomaly or cause to increase the dosage? I don't know why that year was so nice to me and the year before I was getting one to three attacks a month. They're infrequent and random which is why I have self-diagnosed myself as having non-allergic rhinitis. I can't imagine a real allergy being so random especially when I live so static a lifestyle.

      Already I want to breathe through my mouth and I am sure it will resume absent-mindedly. I haven't sneezed though (have come close though) and I've been sneezing a lot in the three hours I've been awake thus far. And I still feel like I'm being suffocated very slowly. If not breathing through my mouth is a part of the solution, I need to cover my mouth with tape that sticks fast to an oily face and removes with a minimum of pain :-)

SIN TAXES

      The amount of pens I find cleaning up at work almost offends me. It's so wasteful, all that plastic and unused ink. When was the last time you used a pen up? I know I've done it, but it takes a long time unless you're writing a lot. But there's no incentive to use up pens; no incentive to make sure you don't lose them. A package of ten at work sells for $2.49 (plus tax) so basically, 25¢ a pen. That's practically nothing and inflation shows it. 25¢ is the penny of the modern age.

      Sometimes I think items like pens, pencils, paper, staples, paper clips, etc....all things which are available cheaply and in what seems to be endless supply, should have artificially inflated prices to discourage waste. There are taxes on gasoline ostensibly to maintain roads, taxes on cigarettes and alcohol (ostensibly) to cover the costs of the health associated with their abuse, etc. so why not a comparable sin tax on items which have become ridiculously cheap and use that money to let's say, fund education or job retraining since I've only named school/office supplies. Actually I'll go with job retraining given how quickly the job market has been evolving in the past thirty years.

      Nothing obscene but given their cost, even if they were all sin-taxed 100%, thus doubling their prices, the aforementioned items would still be quite affordable and it may have the added benefit of people not wasting what they have and making sure people displaced by the ever-changing job market have a means to remain competitive.

UNDERSTANDING IS A THREE-EDGED SWORD...

      Anthony of the Opie and Anthony Show is going on another of his rants about taxes and I love the myopia of it all. He's quoting a statistic that 1% of working New Yorkers pay 43% of all the taxes and he cites this solely as overtaxation.

      Now, I'm not going to say that taxes in the state of New York aren't higher than perhaps they need to be. I agree with Opie when he says he wants to know where the money is going because clearly there is much waste going on that is not being addressed. He even said that he would pay more in taxes if he knew it wasn't being wasted. However, waste isn't the sole issue that taxes are so high on the wealthy and it's the one point that he never addresses: the spread between the highest and lowest incomes.

      I think, back in the 1960s when the top 1% of this country made about 10% of the nation's income, the pay differences between a CEO and his lowest salaried workers was about 24 to 1  meaning the top earner earned twenty-four times what his lowest paid employees made. Nowadays, when the top 1% earn over 24% of the nation's income, CEOs make over 275 times what their lowest paid workers make (and that number would be even higher if their contracted labor - the cleaning crews - were factored in).

      The wealthy pay more in taxes not only because they make more money, but also because they make a lot more money than the people below them. If the income spreads were evened out to be more like the 1960s, the top 1% would still pay more in taxes as a whole number, but less as a percentage...but God forbid they look at that part of the equation.

      So...his side and my side...now what's the truth?

LINE OF THE DAY, part XXIV

      From this article on Gawker, referencing a 16th century erotic poem found recently which referred to it as the first recorded "sext". Gawker wondered what our modern sexting would sound like back in 1531. Commenter The Gadget got Comment of the Day with this gem:

With fevered dreams of limbs entwined,

To thee, I send these secret lines,

In hope this rhyme with thee resounds,

As my lust o'erfills my bounds,

Be assured I fond remember,

Thy loving fondling of my member!

May we together lay once more,

Upon the bed, the stair, or floor.

Too soon my mistress calls, alack.

But if thou want to hit this, holla back.

Awwwwwwww, forsoooooth, baby!

Another commenter responded, "Tapestries or it didn't happen" :-)

SONGS THAT CAN JUST GO AWAY, part VII

"This One's For the Girls" by Martina McBride

I hate these feel-good songs and their ilk. Those songs giving advice; the ones telling you everything will be alright because I've been there too; etc. Okay, I should be clear. Not all of them are bad. It's the ones which feel insincere...like pandering, that anger me. I resent these songs because I feel like I'm being talked down to by an artist oversimplifying difficult issues. This also goes for self-serving autobiographical songs and songs for causes too. And yes I guarantee you I like several songs that fall into these categories despite what I've just written :-)
--- Bonus points if you actually clicked on every link ---

LINE OF THE DAY, part XXIII

From this article on IO9 regarding potential of CP-violation in the universe which would explain why we live in a universe comprised of matter and not a balance of matter/anti-matter or nothing at all. From commenter Cheevocabra responding to another commenter who wondered if anti-matter would behave the same chemically as matter:

"...Chemistry is basically all about positive and negative bits sticking together. Chemistry doesn't care if it's an electron− paired up with a proton+ or a positron+ with an antiproton−, the resulting anti-hydrogen is going to interact with other antimatter the same way hydrogen interacts with normal matter. The mass and other properties of anti-hydrogen would be the same as hydrogen, except the polarities of its constituent particles would be reversed. Plus it would be evil."

ADDENDUM: An article talking about the Higgs boson had this opinion by commenter PhDinSeagalogy:

This is clearly just another excuse for the patriarchal science-monger regime to "discover" a particle that disenfranchises other, feminine particles, and then elevate that particle to a transcendental, phallic godhead. Why isn't it Higgs-bodaughter? Because of the patriarchy, that's why. And I bet that this particle will be all like "I'm a man particle and I love war, get back in the kitchen tachyons!" What we need is an empowered, feminist particle to counteract this phallocentric "physics" that privileges the male-membered "boson" particles over the nurturing "bodaughter" particles. But that will never happen because "science" is just really a sausage-party of sausage-affirmation! Down with the phallocracy of Higgs-boson and up with the koleologocracy of Higgs-bodaughter!

Now if anyone knows what "koleologocracy" is supposed to mean, I'd be much obliged. I'm assuming it's supposed to be the opposite of "rule by penis" that is the word "phallocracy" but I can't find references to it anywhere. The closes I can get is κολεος (koleos) meaning "vagina" but it does not explain the fuller word unless it is supposed to mean "rule by vaginal reason" as λόγος (logos) means "reason". I don't know. I overthink shit.

THOUGHT STARTER

      I've heard some weird things about the character Tom Bombadil from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and when I read this paragraph on the wiki page devoted to the story, I became quite intrigued by the possibilities to storywriting the highlighted line offers:

Other possibilities (compatible with the above theory) are that he is an abstract concept; possibly the embodiment of Arda itself, a veritable "Father Nature", or some kind of 'spirit' which, unlike the Maiar, was of a non-divine nature. Not only does the Ring have no effect on him, but Tom himself seems unable to affect the Ring in return. This shows that Tom was outside the divine plan and struggle and had no position in it. During the Council of Elrond it is suggested that the Free-Peoples entrust the Ring to Tom, but this is rejected due to the probability that he would lose it, because according to Gandalf, such things had no hold on his mind. It is also stated that if Sauron were to regain the Ring, Tom Bombadil would be the last to fall. It is also stated by Galdor that 'Power to defy our enemy is not in him, unless such power is in the earth itself. And yet we see that Sauron can torture and destroy the very hills.' implying that Bombadil is in some way connected with the very earth itself.

      What an interesting idea! I wonder how such a thing would play out in say, Christian mythology? Unless humanity itself could be considered "outside the divine plan" by virtue of having been given free will by God. If that's the case, then this idea is already boring. But I like this idea, perhaps crudely explored in the Matrix trilogy, that there's someone who simply is, but is not a result of our being. Sure, God created the world and all upon it, its inhabitants and life, many and varied...but not this one thing. A separate consciousness, if you will, that can explore and investigate the universe created around it, but which had no part in its creation or purpose. I don't know where I'm going with this. I feel it, but I can't describe what I'm feeling. Maybe you felt it too :-)

PROBABLY INDICATIVE OF SOMETHING...

      I have been watching Survivor since its inception, missing only Seasons 4 and 5. I might  have stayed away for good too, but Season 6 started with a gimmick whereby the men and women were separated and I wanted to check that out. Anyways...

      One of the continuing themes of the show  happens near the end after the tribes have merged. Originally it was just letters from home but as the show's popularity (and presumably budget) improved, it became videograms and in later seasons, actual visits by the family members. Actually, Nan was still alive when I first remember actual visitors (Johnny Fairplay's lie about his dead grandma to get sympathy points with his competitors) so Survivor's been doing this for eight years now at least.

      Every time this moment comes, everybody whether reading a letter, seeing a videogram, or actually seeing their family member in person after about 30 days away from them breaks down in tears. It's a very emotional moment for those involved and yet, since the show's inception, I have been mocking their tears not understanding how a mere thirty days away from the people they love could be such a heavy emotional moment for them.

     But then I realize I have no idea what it feels like to belong at such a level that thirty days apart would actually be emotionally traumatic. My second year of college was probably the closest I will ever come to that sense of belonging.

MORE REJECTED FACEBOOK POSTS...

      It really does bug me just how prolific I get when I am sad. It hasn't even been two months since the last time I made one of these posts and I've already got so many slips of paper that I'm making another entry while stalling  going to bed so I don't have trouble sleeping tomorrow.

Here goes:

INIMANDVS IX

While I have had some good days, I have not been happy for almost thirteen years.