It's the kind of gray, damp, cool day that I love. There's been very little of the rain that Richmond was promised, but I'm thankful for the ease in heat anyhow.
I've been giving myself a lot of crap lately for my life not heading where I want it to. I've been drifting and largely rudderless for a long time. Changing that is really a matter of making a few decisions, and then making sure those decisions stay made from day to day.
You'd think that being bullheaded in my own interest would come easily. We'll have to see.
-Rich
Tuesday, August 27, 2002
Monday, August 26, 2002
PromoGuy's Monday Mission 2.34
1. What do you do to make things better when you feel sad and/or lonely? There're lots of things. I frequently complain, as regular readers here know. :-) Talking with someone almost always helps. I've also been known to slot a videogame or goofy movie to help with the blues.2. Are you a "touchy-feely" person? That is, do you like to touch people you don't know that well? And on the flipside of that, do you like being touched by someone you aren't close with? NOPE and HELL NOPE. Despite my being a very tactile person, I'm not touchy-feely with strangers in any social sense of the term. In many ways I think life would be lots easier if I were the touchy type (certainly dating would).
3. Do you like to have "me" time, time to yourself to be alone and relax? Or do you prefer to just do your own thing with someone else in the room? When was the last "me" time you got and what did you do? Let's see... I sleep for about six hours a night, so that means I get about eighteen hours a day of "me time." Non-me-time is the exception, not the rule, as my job doesn't involve any real human contact during the day. In terms of leisure me-time, lately I've been reading a lot.
4. Generally speaking, how do you feel about the concept of marriage? Are you the marrying type? Do you think the act of getting married means something today or is it simply just "a piece of paper?" Again, dedicated readers will know that I take marriage very seriously and can infer that I am definitely the marrying type, but one of my fears is that marriage is becoming a useless formality. Married? Think you're never gonna get a divorce? Flip a coin. Heads, you're golden. Tails, you're single.
5. That said, as many as 25 states have passed legislation regulating who they believe should be the "marrying type." What are your thoughts on the banning of same-sex marriages? One of the important duties any society has is to perpetuate itself, and I see the legal sanction of marriage (and the tax and other privileges given) as working within that mission. Giving the privileges of marriages to non-"breeder" unions that can't increase a society's population seems misguided to me.
6. If there was one law you had the ability to create or change, what would it be? Not so much a law as a series of laws and their precedents that make up the American divorce system. My own divorce was "amicable" and I didn't get burnt by these laws per se, but there are a hell of a lot of men out there having their parental rights and personal dignity trampled by a divorce system that favors women even when they're shown to be at fault (ask Acidman). Men are guilty until proven innocent in divorce courts, to the point that the decision to marry, for many men, has become too great a financial and personal risk to merit the benefits. Hell, I'm struggling with this myself, and I miss being married.
7. What would you like someone visiting your Blog for the first time to know about you? Now is your chance! I can cook, I give great foot rubs, and I'm a decent conversationalist. :-) Turn-ons: intelligence, wit and humor. Turn-offs: radical feminism, knee-jerk liberalism and hygiene issues. I only bite if asked very nicely. I'm really just this guy, you know?
-Rich
Rain, rain, kindly stay
Go away some other day
Yep, Richmond is getting rain for the first time in several weeks. People are rejoicing all over, except that Richmonders seem to have lost the knack of rain driving in the interim. Several big accidents on the way into work.
I've always loved the rain - I remember sitting, as a child, and watching rivulets move down sliding doors in the Hockessin (Delaware) and Cincinnati houses. Little showers, gully-washers, wrath-of-God thunderstorms, I love 'em all. The Goddess seems to share my affinity.
Some scientists have posited that homo sapiens went through an aquatic or semi-aquatic phase during its development (hmm. Do other primates ever swim?), and that's how we wound up with such a thin "coat" compared to the rest of the primate world. The hypnotic, archetypical place that water holds in our species' psychology and mythology would seem to bear that out.
Theory aside, I have always found it easiest to relax with rushing water or crashing waves nearby. Recordings and white-noise generators don't seem to do it. I haven't tried one of those little pebble-stone fountains that have become so popular, because my pets would see it as an exotic water dish. :-)
Hmm. What an idea - a beachside vacation! Preferably with rain. Yeah, I'm one of those crazy people who likes rainy, cold beaches.
-Rich
I've always loved the rain - I remember sitting, as a child, and watching rivulets move down sliding doors in the Hockessin (Delaware) and Cincinnati houses. Little showers, gully-washers, wrath-of-God thunderstorms, I love 'em all. The Goddess seems to share my affinity.
Some scientists have posited that homo sapiens went through an aquatic or semi-aquatic phase during its development (hmm. Do other primates ever swim?), and that's how we wound up with such a thin "coat" compared to the rest of the primate world. The hypnotic, archetypical place that water holds in our species' psychology and mythology would seem to bear that out.
Theory aside, I have always found it easiest to relax with rushing water or crashing waves nearby. Recordings and white-noise generators don't seem to do it. I haven't tried one of those little pebble-stone fountains that have become so popular, because my pets would see it as an exotic water dish. :-)
Hmm. What an idea - a beachside vacation! Preferably with rain. Yeah, I'm one of those crazy people who likes rainy, cold beaches.
-Rich
Friday, August 23, 2002
Friday Five
1. What is your current occupation? Is this what you chose to be doing at this point in your life? Why or why not? I'm currently a computer programmer. Yep, I chose it. FWIW, I believe that no matter where we are in life, we've chosen it. I chose to marry young and impetuous, thus I'm divorced. I chose to groove on computers all my life and I certainly chose which jobs I applied for, so ...yep. :-)2. If time/talent/money were no object, what would your dream occupation be? A novelist. And time, talent and money ARE no object, yet I accomplish little. Working on this.
3. What did/do your parents do for a living? Has this had any influence on your career choices? My dad was an executive for a plastics company; he's now happily retired. My mom has been a stay-at-home mom for most of her adult life, though she's taught a lot of preschool as well. Also happily retired. Did these influence my career decisions? Nope, other than to actually pursue a career and not raise yaks in India or something. :-)
4. Have you ever had to choose between having a career and having a family? Nope. It wouldn't be a choice anyway - given the chance for a family with a woman I loved, any job would exist to support the family, not the other way around.
5. In your opinion, what is the easiest job in the world? What is the hardest? Why? Easiest? Food taster, probably, or toy/game tester. Hardest? Somewhere between parent and policeman. Parenting for all the reasons Joie listed, and policeman for the obvious reasons. Well, possibly policeman's wife, now that I think about it.
-Rich
Thursday, August 22, 2002
Mac vs. Wintel: The Endless Debate
There's a lot of buzz around the tech community lately lately about Mac OS X, its new 10.2 version named "Jaguar," and how it compares with Windows XP.
The case for Windows
I have several Windows boxes at home, running Win98SE and Win2000 Professional. I use XP Professional extensively at work. I've used every flavor of Windows since 3.0, excepting Windows ME, because I do have some standards. :-) I live, eat and breathe Microsoft products for both work and leisure. I build Windows boxes for fun.
Windows boxes also generally like me. It's hard to explain, but I seldom see the crashiness or trashiness that Windows is excoriated for; it may be that after years of practice I know how to build 'em right, or that without thinking I avoid the land mines, or that Bill Gates takes pity on fat guys. Who knows? But Windows boxes work just dandily for me.
The case for Mac
I've also got a pretty solid Mac background. The first non-Tandy, non-Commodore computer I used outside of my home was a Mac; we had original 128K Macs at my high school. System 6, System 7, 8 and 9... I've used them all to one extent or another over the years, and by System 9 it was pretty clear MacOS was aging terribly compared to a Windows 2000 or XP (or even some aspects of 98).
Mac OS X has changed all that. I've got OS X 10.1.5 running on a 288 MB, 300 MHz Tangerine iBook at home, and it's slick as snail snot. I love it, and the poor iBook has none of the whiz-bangy features of more modern Macs: glassy casings, huge LCDs, FireWire, none of them. It makes a great word processing machine, because it (mostly) gets out of the way. And both my mom and my cat Sushi love the machine -- maybe it's the color orange or the swoopy lines.
(It's important to note that Mac hardware continues to lag behind Wintel something fierce. Intel will be shipping processors by Christmas 2002 that will execute three billion integer operations a second (3 GHz), while Mac users are only just cresting the 1 GHz barrier. There's some arguments that can be made for Apple's Motorola CPUs having some edge in power-per-operation than Intel's for some operations, but it's nothing that's going to make up a three-to-one difference in raw horsepower if you've gotta have speed.)
...But back to the debate.
As I'm wont to do, I've been looking around, and it's very telling that some of the bigger advocates of OS X are in fact Linux users. I ran a Linux partition on one of my boxes as an Open Source True Believer for something like two years, and there are two hallmarks of the stereotypical Linux user that are relevant here: they appreciate technical elegance, and they're not afraid (in fact they like) to get their hands dirty in a system's technical details. Oh, and they've had to deal with occasionally brilliant, always quirky, but inevitably cobbled-together desktop interfaces, and are largely tired of it. And they've had to put up with spit-and-baling-wire support for most non-vanilla hardware for so long that compiling beta-level device drivers into mission-critical Linux kernels is a common task for the "power" Linux user. Okay, more than two. :-)
Enter OS X, which is arguably the first operating system to feature an elegant, seamless desktop atop a complete Unix foundation. On top of that, hardware integration manages to be less painful (i.e., "just work") for most users than the Windows Way (my experiences notwithstanding), and to run circles around the Linux Way. Combine that with Apple's penchant for manufacturing Really Cool Cases (tm), and the fact that a Unix command line is always available in OS X, and you've got a combination that diehard Linux users are finding hard to ignore, despite Wintel's massive CPU-speed advantage.
My take on all this? I'm big on whiz-bang tech, so it's not unheard of for a sexy computer case to draw me, but before OS X I really didn't care for the way that Apple hid basic configuration details from me as a user. Windows provides most of that information if you're willing to learn. Mac OS X, though, allows that access as well, and manages to feel more intelligently coupled with underlying hardware than either Windows or a well-tuned Linux box can. And a Unix command line simply rocks if you know how to use it.
There's just one problem. I like to play games (it's the main purpose for my home box), and if they ever come out for the Mac most games are months in doing so. On top of that, the games I like playing usually require lots of horses under the hood, and Macs still lag PCs there.
But my iBook has been imbued with new life -- it's now a usable, reliable, beautiful word-processing machine (if you like orange, which I do); despite being three-year-old hardware, it feels like the most advanced machine in the apartment. The artist in me likes that a lot.
But you still can't build a Mac from parts. You can build the most important 85% of the experience with Windows, and perhaps a different 90% of the experience with Linux, and both options come out cheaper and allow more control and CPU oomph.
-Rich
The case for Windows
I have several Windows boxes at home, running Win98SE and Win2000 Professional. I use XP Professional extensively at work. I've used every flavor of Windows since 3.0, excepting Windows ME, because I do have some standards. :-) I live, eat and breathe Microsoft products for both work and leisure. I build Windows boxes for fun.
Windows boxes also generally like me. It's hard to explain, but I seldom see the crashiness or trashiness that Windows is excoriated for; it may be that after years of practice I know how to build 'em right, or that without thinking I avoid the land mines, or that Bill Gates takes pity on fat guys. Who knows? But Windows boxes work just dandily for me.
The case for Mac
I've also got a pretty solid Mac background. The first non-Tandy, non-Commodore computer I used outside of my home was a Mac; we had original 128K Macs at my high school. System 6, System 7, 8 and 9... I've used them all to one extent or another over the years, and by System 9 it was pretty clear MacOS was aging terribly compared to a Windows 2000 or XP (or even some aspects of 98).
Mac OS X has changed all that. I've got OS X 10.1.5 running on a 288 MB, 300 MHz Tangerine iBook at home, and it's slick as snail snot. I love it, and the poor iBook has none of the whiz-bangy features of more modern Macs: glassy casings, huge LCDs, FireWire, none of them. It makes a great word processing machine, because it (mostly) gets out of the way. And both my mom and my cat Sushi love the machine -- maybe it's the color orange or the swoopy lines.
(It's important to note that Mac hardware continues to lag behind Wintel something fierce. Intel will be shipping processors by Christmas 2002 that will execute three billion integer operations a second (3 GHz), while Mac users are only just cresting the 1 GHz barrier. There's some arguments that can be made for Apple's Motorola CPUs having some edge in power-per-operation than Intel's for some operations, but it's nothing that's going to make up a three-to-one difference in raw horsepower if you've gotta have speed.)
...But back to the debate.
As I'm wont to do, I've been looking around, and it's very telling that some of the bigger advocates of OS X are in fact Linux users. I ran a Linux partition on one of my boxes as an Open Source True Believer for something like two years, and there are two hallmarks of the stereotypical Linux user that are relevant here: they appreciate technical elegance, and they're not afraid (in fact they like) to get their hands dirty in a system's technical details. Oh, and they've had to deal with occasionally brilliant, always quirky, but inevitably cobbled-together desktop interfaces, and are largely tired of it. And they've had to put up with spit-and-baling-wire support for most non-vanilla hardware for so long that compiling beta-level device drivers into mission-critical Linux kernels is a common task for the "power" Linux user. Okay, more than two. :-)
Enter OS X, which is arguably the first operating system to feature an elegant, seamless desktop atop a complete Unix foundation. On top of that, hardware integration manages to be less painful (i.e., "just work") for most users than the Windows Way (my experiences notwithstanding), and to run circles around the Linux Way. Combine that with Apple's penchant for manufacturing Really Cool Cases (tm), and the fact that a Unix command line is always available in OS X, and you've got a combination that diehard Linux users are finding hard to ignore, despite Wintel's massive CPU-speed advantage.
My take on all this? I'm big on whiz-bang tech, so it's not unheard of for a sexy computer case to draw me, but before OS X I really didn't care for the way that Apple hid basic configuration details from me as a user. Windows provides most of that information if you're willing to learn. Mac OS X, though, allows that access as well, and manages to feel more intelligently coupled with underlying hardware than either Windows or a well-tuned Linux box can. And a Unix command line simply rocks if you know how to use it.
There's just one problem. I like to play games (it's the main purpose for my home box), and if they ever come out for the Mac most games are months in doing so. On top of that, the games I like playing usually require lots of horses under the hood, and Macs still lag PCs there.
But my iBook has been imbued with new life -- it's now a usable, reliable, beautiful word-processing machine (if you like orange, which I do); despite being three-year-old hardware, it feels like the most advanced machine in the apartment. The artist in me likes that a lot.
But you still can't build a Mac from parts. You can build the most important 85% of the experience with Windows, and perhaps a different 90% of the experience with Linux, and both options come out cheaper and allow more control and CPU oomph.
-Rich
Wednesday, August 21, 2002
Whiffs
So I'm sitting here thinking about what to post today. I'm already sorry I posted yesterday's whine and cheese, so we certainly don't want to go there again.
I'm sucking on a nice strong peppermint as I post, so I've decided to wax rhapsodic about smells and tastes. Not as pertains to blogs, this time, but some general stuff.
Smells have a close association to recall, so of course certain combinations of smells can take you way back. When I fill my mind with memories of the smell (and sounds and sights) of the salty, breezy Atlantic ocean, I remember sunny trips to visit my grandparents in Pompano Beach as I was growing up; of learning to body-surf; of collecting seashells; of washing tar off my feet and salt off the rest of me in a sandy little tile square by a pool. I remember walking on cold, gray, windswept beaches in college, jeans rolled up under my knees and briny spray in the beard I had then, and feeling the rest of life before me; optimism amid crashing surf and calling gulls, flying like hell just to keep stationary in the near-gale.
That delightful smell of wood burning conjures memories of innumerable camping trips as a Boy Scout; of learning to cook scrambled eggs on a griddle, and learning how to splice rope-ends into strong loops. I remember hiking the 72 miles of my trip to Philmont Scout Reservation, of giggling at hailstones the size of watch faces as they piled up outside the tents, because there was nothing we could do. I remember branding my boots, and reaching the summit of Mount Baldy before anyone else in my group. I remember the birch beer at Ponil Camp, the wooden tables we set the icy mugs on, and how it was the best thing I could remember ever tasting. I remember the fires Jennifer and I had in the fireplace in our house in Ashland, and that I never did get to make love to her by firelight.
Crushed grass... A whole mélange of associations there... Mowing the lawn weekend after weekend growing up; being at the grunting, painful bottom of a pile of plastic, sweat and limbs during football season; picnics and hikes with Jennifer; sitting and talking with my host brother in something that wasn't German and wasn't English as we slowly got smashed on hoppy, warm Holtzkirschner in a field outside Bad Neustadt.
Books and paper - almost too many memories to list: my parents' immense Random House Dictionary; the many old, blue-bound volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica I grew up with; the first Bible I received; the hundreds and hundreds of yellow, pulpy comic books I bought; the crisp, slick pages of the red-bound Lord of the Rings trilogy volume I still have, but have never finished; the red-dusted bookshelves of the Ashland house; the slightly vanilla-smelling pages of my copy of Cradle to Cradle; the musty, inviting shelves of the Corpus Christi school library in Cincinnati, where I learned about sketching, magic tricks and spaceships and pirates for the first time. The dog-eared high-school notebooks filled with as many smeared pencil superhero and anatomy sketches as words; the decades-old maroon-bound anatomy textbook my dad gave me when I asked. The sharp edges of folded and torn notepaper that I learned to make into Origami cranes, robins, grasshoppers, cicadas, airplanes and sailing ships, all forgotten. The rooms I've shared with Tripp in college and visited afterwards, from my fresh new copies of the Illuminatus! trilogy, to cheap copies of Principia Discordia to the Greek and Sanskrit books he eventually studied, to his copy of the Lays of Beleriand and spending days translating Tolkien's Tengwar script and memorizing historical Futhark runes. Inkwells and chisel-nib pens; learning twenty, thirty calligraphy "hands" and doing Cadeau ornamentation for Society for Creative Anachronism scrolls; copying goofy verses onto imitation vellum in Luxeuil Minuscule with blood-red ink to "ward" my dorm room.
Hey, I was young and already resigned to being weird. :-)
Anyway, this series of trips down Memory Lane has been brought to you by the numbers 3 and 2 and a long, empty afternoon. :-)
-Rich
I'm sucking on a nice strong peppermint as I post, so I've decided to wax rhapsodic about smells and tastes. Not as pertains to blogs, this time, but some general stuff.
Smells have a close association to recall, so of course certain combinations of smells can take you way back. When I fill my mind with memories of the smell (and sounds and sights) of the salty, breezy Atlantic ocean, I remember sunny trips to visit my grandparents in Pompano Beach as I was growing up; of learning to body-surf; of collecting seashells; of washing tar off my feet and salt off the rest of me in a sandy little tile square by a pool. I remember walking on cold, gray, windswept beaches in college, jeans rolled up under my knees and briny spray in the beard I had then, and feeling the rest of life before me; optimism amid crashing surf and calling gulls, flying like hell just to keep stationary in the near-gale.
That delightful smell of wood burning conjures memories of innumerable camping trips as a Boy Scout; of learning to cook scrambled eggs on a griddle, and learning how to splice rope-ends into strong loops. I remember hiking the 72 miles of my trip to Philmont Scout Reservation, of giggling at hailstones the size of watch faces as they piled up outside the tents, because there was nothing we could do. I remember branding my boots, and reaching the summit of Mount Baldy before anyone else in my group. I remember the birch beer at Ponil Camp, the wooden tables we set the icy mugs on, and how it was the best thing I could remember ever tasting. I remember the fires Jennifer and I had in the fireplace in our house in Ashland, and that I never did get to make love to her by firelight.
Crushed grass... A whole mélange of associations there... Mowing the lawn weekend after weekend growing up; being at the grunting, painful bottom of a pile of plastic, sweat and limbs during football season; picnics and hikes with Jennifer; sitting and talking with my host brother in something that wasn't German and wasn't English as we slowly got smashed on hoppy, warm Holtzkirschner in a field outside Bad Neustadt.
Books and paper - almost too many memories to list: my parents' immense Random House Dictionary; the many old, blue-bound volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica I grew up with; the first Bible I received; the hundreds and hundreds of yellow, pulpy comic books I bought; the crisp, slick pages of the red-bound Lord of the Rings trilogy volume I still have, but have never finished; the red-dusted bookshelves of the Ashland house; the slightly vanilla-smelling pages of my copy of Cradle to Cradle; the musty, inviting shelves of the Corpus Christi school library in Cincinnati, where I learned about sketching, magic tricks and spaceships and pirates for the first time. The dog-eared high-school notebooks filled with as many smeared pencil superhero and anatomy sketches as words; the decades-old maroon-bound anatomy textbook my dad gave me when I asked. The sharp edges of folded and torn notepaper that I learned to make into Origami cranes, robins, grasshoppers, cicadas, airplanes and sailing ships, all forgotten. The rooms I've shared with Tripp in college and visited afterwards, from my fresh new copies of the Illuminatus! trilogy, to cheap copies of Principia Discordia to the Greek and Sanskrit books he eventually studied, to his copy of the Lays of Beleriand and spending days translating Tolkien's Tengwar script and memorizing historical Futhark runes. Inkwells and chisel-nib pens; learning twenty, thirty calligraphy "hands" and doing Cadeau ornamentation for Society for Creative Anachronism scrolls; copying goofy verses onto imitation vellum in Luxeuil Minuscule with blood-red ink to "ward" my dorm room.
Hey, I was young and already resigned to being weird. :-)
Anyway, this series of trips down Memory Lane has been brought to you by the numbers 3 and 2 and a long, empty afternoon. :-)
-Rich
Tuesday, August 20, 2002
Purpose
There come times in most everyone's lives where you begin to wonder what you're supposed to be doing. When you wake up in the morning and wonder, "how the hell did I get here?"
That's where I am lately. I graduated from college ten years ago very bullish on parenting, marriage, and generally on the "house, wife, picket fence, 2.4 kids and a dog" track; two years ago that sunk with nary a trace, and since then I've been casting about for a directional "hook" on which to hang my hat.
In many ways I have little to complain about: I have a decent-paying job, a great family and two dogs and a cat that love me, several wonderful friends, a nice apartment and lots of toys. Counting blessings is a very effective way of reassuring oneself about one's current state. When I look two, five, ten years down the road, though, things are pretty bleak. I don't love my job enough to do it forever, and I don't love my own companionship enough to keep waking up every morning and having to determine for myself what the point is again.
When I was married, even when it was awful to the point of not wanting to go home at the end of the workday, the "provider, protector" purpose was still clear. The world preaches not to need anyone or consider yourself incomplete, but where do I fit in a world that doesn't care if I get fired tomorrow, or if I triumph over stupidity and animus for another day? Why bother going to all the effort if there's no prize of companionship and comfort to look forward to?
I'm a programmer, a writer and a tinkerer. I'm getting better at all these things as I age, and they bring a certain amount of fulfillment in themselves, but when it comes to brass tacks I don't give a rip about these things -- I want to be needed; I want to be important to someone snuggly and funny. I want someone to watch sunsets with, and playing kids, and fires in the fireplace. I'll sacrifice for that, work for that. There's honor in shoveling week-old horseshit if it keeps a roof over your family's head. But what happens when there's no family? What's the point to job, or roof?
As it is, I feel like a wind-up toy that's lost a wheel: spinning in frantic circles, expending all sorts of energy for little headway or purpose.
Time has also ceased to be my friend. Unless I want to start dating people five or ten years younger than myself (and be pushing retirement when the hypothetical kids hit college), time is sort of running out to get a family started. At the same time, nothing drives people off like the twin stinks of need and desperation, so this sort of thinking is worse than useless.
Hmf. End vent. Not fun. Readers run away.
Anyway, love the one you're with, people. It's all we really get.
-Rich
That's where I am lately. I graduated from college ten years ago very bullish on parenting, marriage, and generally on the "house, wife, picket fence, 2.4 kids and a dog" track; two years ago that sunk with nary a trace, and since then I've been casting about for a directional "hook" on which to hang my hat.
In many ways I have little to complain about: I have a decent-paying job, a great family and two dogs and a cat that love me, several wonderful friends, a nice apartment and lots of toys. Counting blessings is a very effective way of reassuring oneself about one's current state. When I look two, five, ten years down the road, though, things are pretty bleak. I don't love my job enough to do it forever, and I don't love my own companionship enough to keep waking up every morning and having to determine for myself what the point is again.
When I was married, even when it was awful to the point of not wanting to go home at the end of the workday, the "provider, protector" purpose was still clear. The world preaches not to need anyone or consider yourself incomplete, but where do I fit in a world that doesn't care if I get fired tomorrow, or if I triumph over stupidity and animus for another day? Why bother going to all the effort if there's no prize of companionship and comfort to look forward to?
I'm a programmer, a writer and a tinkerer. I'm getting better at all these things as I age, and they bring a certain amount of fulfillment in themselves, but when it comes to brass tacks I don't give a rip about these things -- I want to be needed; I want to be important to someone snuggly and funny. I want someone to watch sunsets with, and playing kids, and fires in the fireplace. I'll sacrifice for that, work for that. There's honor in shoveling week-old horseshit if it keeps a roof over your family's head. But what happens when there's no family? What's the point to job, or roof?
As it is, I feel like a wind-up toy that's lost a wheel: spinning in frantic circles, expending all sorts of energy for little headway or purpose.
Time has also ceased to be my friend. Unless I want to start dating people five or ten years younger than myself (and be pushing retirement when the hypothetical kids hit college), time is sort of running out to get a family started. At the same time, nothing drives people off like the twin stinks of need and desperation, so this sort of thinking is worse than useless.
Hmf. End vent. Not fun. Readers run away.
Anyway, love the one you're with, people. It's all we really get.
-Rich
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