well, after almost 10 days of chaos, it would seem that the planets have aligned closely enough to allow me a moment to do an update. i'm sitting at home right now, wrapped in my comfy bathrobe, alone alone alone. for the first time in i don't know how long.

took my yearly trip to visit my grandmother and assorted family on my mother's side for christmas, and fell further into this bad habit of mine. it seems like every year i get more and more disconnected from everything that's supposed to mean the most to me–my family and friends. almost as soon as i got to my grandmother's house, i went down into the basement, picked up the awesome Batman: Black & White that Paul got me for Christmas, and read half of it before people realized i was missing and started coming downstairs to convince me to come up and hang out.

part of the thing is, there is so much not happening in my life, nothing of real importance anyway, that i rarely have anything to talk about. and, as Paul pointed out, pretty much everyone in my family is blindly Republican, so i really don't have anything more in common with them than blood and a little history. and despite what people try to say, that is just not enough.

so, i'm hanging out at my grandmother's house for four days, being almost totally anti-social, getting depressed about the fact that i seemingly can't connect on a human level with anyone anywhere anytime, and the fact that it's christmas and the joy and happiness i used to feel as a child just isn't there anymore. the excitement at waking up in the morning and seeing what "santa" had left in my stocking and under the tree is gone. it's just another day in a repeating series of 365 that never seems to end, that just constantly loops.

two of my younger cousins are married, one already has a new baby and the other is expecting. i'm not alone in the singles arena, but these cousins are like 5 or 6 years younger than me. i always, growing up, figured that i would get married around 21, have a child by 25 and be able to spend christmas at grandma's with my loving wife, making goo-goo eyes at her and basking in the warmth of her interactions with my aunts and female cousins while the entire family gathered around and gushed over my adorable baby. i never expected to be the 27 year old, single, anti-social deviant of the family. the basement-dweller.

then christmas day comes, we're all gathered around in the living room, all… christ, like 25 – 30 of us, unwrapping presents, talking, laughing, carrying on. i get more boxes than i really expected too, which is nice, i suppose. but then i look over at my mom & dad, sitting over there in a corner of the room, mom holding (my cousin's) new baby with a big motherly smile on her face, dad sitting in the floor next to her, and i notice that there is only ONE bag, only ONE present of any kind in their vicinity. i looked more closely at my mother's face, and thought that i could see–through the happiness at watching her family's joy–a little sadness, a little dissapointment, a question. i felt like i could see the same emotion that i'd felt on a few occasions as a child (or a teenager) when i felt like i'd not gotten quite enough presents to really know that i was loved. (which was really silly of me, but we all know how that goes). MY PARENTS had only gotten ONE present. three children, mom's seven sisters & brothers, their wives, their children, and only ONE present. once i came to this realization, whatever joy i had was no longer there. i focused on the look in my mothers face, the look that was deeper than the almost eternal mask of happiness she carries. i looked at my father and saw the same look that i must have had on several different occasions throughout the years, saw the same body language, the same almost unnoticeable indication of dissapointment. the same struggle to maintain the masks of joy that are required on christmas day.

after the christmas wrapping carnage was over, i carried my new things down into the basement, threw on my coat, and went out for a smoke. the one place i was sure i wouldn't be interrupted. i thought about my parent's one present, i thought about the fact that i'd had to call my parents two weeks ago to ask for my christmas money early just so i wouldn't overdraw my checking account. i thought about all the other times i've had to call on my parents to bail me out of some self-inflicted financial hardship or other, and how they've always come through for me. i thought about how i was able to buy presents for most of my friends (whom i love dearly) but i wasn't able to buy a single thing for my parents.

next year will be different. i'm going to make an effort to save money throughout the year so that, when christmas rolls around, i'll have a nice little stash set aside for transforming my parents falsely joyful faces into faces of real happiness. into faces that say that they know they are loved.

next christmas will be different.

well, back from the ol' homestead and haven't had enough of a moment since my return to do an update. almost as soon as i returned on Saturday night, i went out with Paul & Brax, and had a bit of an adventure.

on the home front though, to complete the story of my recent visit, Friday was political discussion day. dinner rolled around and mom provoked the whole thing. dad had been amazingly quiet about the emails we'd exchanged ( read them here: first email & second email ) and only my mom & my little brother had talked to me about them. well, after mom brought it up, then it started. i think dad & I were talking for about an hour and a half, not really making any progress at all, just talking around each other's arguments. we pretty much covered everything. he's a pretty stubborn man, and i conceded a few points to him in the hopes that he'd realize i wasn't arguing just to argue and ignoring my logic on that basis.
      i was disappointed by my father's selfishness and narrowmindedness. he's a very intelligent, thoughful man–generally–and i hold him in high esteem. but the struggles that he has had to face in his life, from the time he was a little boy growing up in the "hollers" of virginia, while building his character and intellect to such an enviable level, have also contributed to and molded this mindset that prevents him from automatically thinking of others (far removed from himself) before himself. his arguments were pretty much all concerned with the immediate impact of some of the ideas that–of necessity–must be considered for their long-term advantages or the advantages they will provide to others who may not currently have them.

thankfully our talk(s, eventually) never grew to the argument stage, but i think we both got flustered at some points when we thought the other was just not listening or understanding. it's frustrating to attempt to explain these abstract concepts you've got buzzing around your head, to not be able to sufficiently explain them with the language we're given. hell, i run into that all the time here on this weblog.

overall, i had a wonderful weekend with my folks and little brother (who ain't so little anymore–he's 13 and his shoes are only a half size smaller than mine… ). much more pleasant than i'd thought it might be. sometimes, though, i think my dad just puts up with my shit because he knows it would break my mom's heart if we were to truly have some kind of split. don't think i've written about my relationship with my dad here, perhaps that'll be a subject for a different time.

      in other news

www.mchawking.com has updated finally and have a new song by that hip-hop master–MC Stephen Hawking. The new song e=mc hawking isn't quite as good as the previous tunes, but still worth a listen. If you've not visited the site before, my two favorite songs would have to be entropy, and fuck the creationists. where else are you going to get a healthy dose of humor, hip-hop, and theoretical physics in one go? nowhere, baby, let me tell you.

well, thanksgiving went off without a hitch. my parents did their normal thing of having several families over for breakfast in the morning, so i got to see all those people that i only see once a year. and no sooner had i gotten out of the shower and dressed, than i realized that i was almost completely uncomfortable around most of them. these are the people that i grew up around, and i'm so different from the person i was back then. i mainly just filled my plate with all that good food, sat down in the livingroom away from all the people, and just quietly stuffed my face. i don't even really feel bad about it, 'cause i didn't come home to see them. i came home to be with my family, all this extra thanksgiving bullshit is just an excuse and a couple extra days off work to make it possible.

it has been amazingly calm around here today though. i was worried that my dad & I would get into a big argument over politics, but he hasn't even really said anything to me about it. in fact, i've had more discussions with my mom and little brother about it than with my dad. maybe he's just biding his time.

i am planning to post–for your reading pleasure–the emails i sent my dad about my political feelings. hopefully i'll be able to get those formatted and uploaded tomorrow (er… today…)

i was also very happy to talk to my sister, who called from france. she's planning on coming home for christmas, so i'll get to see her then.

well, i've been up since 8:00, my brain & body are about to shut down from the food overload.

good to hear the puffin had a decent day as well.

well, i'm at home now. thankfully i had enough foresight to find out the 800 number for my ISP before leaving the 'ville, so i can post for all you lovely people to read.

enjoyed the ride down immensely, what with the new MP3 CD player I got and all. it's a little quirky, but it does well enough i suppose. earlier today i scoured through my mp3s on my computer at work and pulled out just enough to fill a cd, which i think came out to about 165 songs. slammed them all into the root directory of the disk, deleted the track numbers from their filenames, and pretty much wrote them to the cd in alphabetical order. the funny part was that, with the player set on random, the first hour was pretty much Billy Idol, Liz Phair, Chris Isaac, Beastie Boys, NIN, & Bloodloss, then when i see the first signs for Princeton, it suddenly becomes Kid A time. three songs from Kid A–almost consecutively–played me in on the last leg from the parkway to my parent's house. i was excited and amused by how appropriately the mood was set. another funny observation i made was that, despite the number of Mudhoney tracks on the disc, i don't recall any getting played. apparently hour four would have been Mudhoney hour if the trip had lasted that long.

walked into the house, gave my mom and my little bro a hug, then pretty much just submitted myself to my brother's always animated discussions. i see a lot of myself in him, and then there are other things that he's not managed to avoid like i did when i was his age. i walk back into his bedroom (which used to be mine, ages ago.) and hear Hank Williams, Jr. playing on his stereo. i informed him that i was going to take him to Wal-Mart (the only thing that passes for a record store in these parts–that i'm aware of) and buy him a cd or two. i've decided that Kid A is at the top of my list. (paul will love to hear this.)

after somewhat settling in, we set up the laptop, logged on, chatted with brian (& paul, very briefly) for a bit, started doing some remote setup of the new x:13 server (soon, soon), and had what was basically a warm-up round of political discussions with my little bro… a mini version of the large discussion/argument i'm likely to have with my father tomorrow night after all the guests leave. thankfully, my brother's only 13, and still has quite a few years to figure things out.

happy smallpox and genocide day to all you turkey (& mock turkey) eaters out there.

g'night.

it's as bad as i'd feared. my father's influence still reigns supreme in my family's house. i just received an email from my (13 year old) brother today… he sent me a George W. Bush e-card. uggghhhh…

i know he'll grow up and learn things on his own the way i did, but it still frightens me that my own family is just as blind as they've always been.

I didn't want to enjoy this, but there's actually some interesting stuff that's been made available because of the Freedom of Information Act. it's still funny how the whole "disclosure" thing works, with one sentence or phrase out of fifty actually not censored.

the most disturbing thing was scrolling through the index and seeing my uncle's name. turns out my uncle has the same name (including middle initial) as an assasinated state senator.

well, didn't do any drunken scripting last night, but did a bit of drunken ogling of beautiful women. unfortunately, brian and I were both ogling the same girl, and brian being in the mood he was in I didn't really feel like making any moves (out of respect) (that, and I probably wouldn't have made any moves anyway, 'cause I never do, and really don't think I even know how anymore).

sometimes, and more often lately, I feel like a complete social retard, unable to communicate or connect with the people around me, often, even with my closest friends. even my sister and I, though I love her to death and was really happy to get to see her again, didn't really talk that much the few hours she was here. I find myself riding in cars with my best friends, hanging out with them, and–maybe–saying 15 words between locations… I don't know if its me, or what. it's not that I don't want to talk with them, quite the contrary, it's just that for some reason most of the time I don't feel I have anything worthwhile to say. I think that's why my best days tend to be days when my friends are all happy and talky, and I can just kind of sit and listen to them and not really feel pressured to contribute.

and it's not that I'm a total mute either, I can and do talk to them, but there're just those times, and to me, it just seems like they happen too often.

i've also come to the conclusion that if I don't have it already, i'm probably developing some mild form of seasonal affective disorder. too many things have happened to me during the winter months of my life that haven't been good, or that have started out good and ended up with me mentally and emotionally beaten again. too many memories.

mothers against drunken scripting

I'm excited I get to see my sister again. she's been gone away all summer, after visiting me for one day after her year-long trip to France. Now, she's coming up for a visit for one day and I'm taking her to the airport tomorrow so she can go to France again. I'm beginning to think the only way I'll ever get to hang out with my sister again is if I go visit her in France. not that that would be a bad thing, mind you.

I've also realized today that I'm going to have to do some more crazy javascript crap for these pages, since anybody trying to link to our archived pages is going to get bounced out to the main pages (only if you try to access them directly, otherwise, as long as you're in the frames, everything'll work fine.) got some thinking to do tonight.

i wonder if I can code javascript while drunk? we'll find out.

I am a really really sad individual. sad in a "what a pathetic loser" sort of way, rather than a "woe is me" kind of way.

I have just spent an inordinate amount of time on raging.com–a new search engine by the AltaVista crew, which really isn't any different or better than all the other search engines out there except that it doesn't have a bunch of extraneous "My" kinda crap and ad banners all over the place on it–and if you've never done this, i really don't recommend it. the ultimate pursuit of vanity.

i plugged my own name into the search engine. to my partial surprise, it found over 1,000 pages that "matched" my query. i immediately tried to get more specific by using "+" signs, trying, somewhat unsuccessfully to get it to do a boolean-and type search. my lack of success, I suppose, bespeaks my ignorance and the fact that I've only briefly read those search "help pages." who the fuck knows how those damn search engines work… i plug in rabbits and I get hot steamy asian anal rampage.

anyway, there actually were a few pages with my name on them, but strangely enough, none of them had anything to do with any aspect of my life over the past three or four years. and, of course, none of my own pages come up… weird. 'course I suppose it would help if I submitted the damn things to the search engines.

i did find a few genealogy pages, with listings of people who might have been my ancestors, and obituary pages, which was a little off-putting and I didn't really delve into out of some paranoid fear of actually seeing my own name.

thats it. i'm out.

I had a very emotionally mixed day yesterday, and a very draining one. I went to pick up my sister at the airport, on her flight in from France. she'd been there a year, and I must say I'm very happy to see her again. unfortunately, events leading up to our reunion really ruined everything for me.
      waking up, I was in a decent mood yesterday, and went to run some errands before leaving town for Cincinnati. got the oil changed, got some grub, and hit the road. the night before, I had gotten online to get a map to help me find the Cincinnati airport, since I'd never been there before. I had a little trouble on mapquest since I didn't know the airport's address. I eventually navigated my way to a superpages listing for the Cincinnati Northern Kentucky International Airport, and followed the link to get a map. Everything looked good, there was a star on the map in Cincinnati, near I-71. I assumed I had the problem of finding the place licked. If you live in or near Cincinnati, you probably have some idea of just how wrong I was.
      so anyway, I'm driving up I-71 from Louisville, cruising down the highway with my map at my side, the sun scorching my skin, and the wind blasting my hair into some unimaginably tangled mass of insanity. Just outside Cincinnati, I meet up with a 10 or so mile traffic jam, which, of course, I hadn't really taken into consideration since it was around 2:00pm. on a Friday–silly me thought most normal people would already be at work… I got through that, and made my way perilously through the maze of construction detours and bridges and underpasses that is what passes for an "expressway" through southern Cincy. Once out of the construction zone, I expected to see signs pointing my way triumphantly to the nearby waiting airport and my most likely already disembarked sister.
      once I got out of Cincinnati proper and hadn't seen any signs, I turned around and went back down I-71, again thinking perhaps I'd missed the signs, or they hadn't posted them on the North side of the expressway (believe it or not, we have run into this problem when driving through Cincy on other occasions, it's a fucked up place, and I've decided that I hate it and if I never ever go back in billion years, it will be too soon). before getting back down 71 too far, I exited the expressway and stopped at a gas station to ask the clerk how exactly to get to the airport. she kindly pointed me back onto the expressway and explained that I'd see the signs that would direct me to it in about five minutes or so. cool. now I knew where to go.
      I took off and followed the glorious signs that said International Airport, took 471 south, and cursed profusely when I almost immediately crossed the river to Kentucky. Logically, I thought, the Cincinnati airport can't be in Kentucky, since Cincinnati is in Ohio. I thought I was on top of things. I looked again at my map, and specifically noted the street names near the big blue star marking the airport in the middle of the city. I drove back up I-71, and didn't see any airport signs again, didn't see any signs for the streets I wanted, so I pulled off again, and then had a wonderful adventure driving 20 minutes through over 100 blocks of city streets following neverending signs leading me back to the express way. Needless to say, the trip just kept getting more and more absurd. At this point, I was already over an hour late to meet my sister, I was hot, sweaty, and smelly from sitting in my damn non-air-conditioned car for three hours. And I was really getting pissed off.
      once I finally got back on I-71, I almost immediately saw the sign for one of the roads that was supposedly near the airport, so I pulled back off and into the city. two blocks later, I was back on a more southerly section of the street I'd just left. I found the expressway once more, drove back north, passed where my earlier excursion had started, and pulled off and back on to the expressway once more going south. one more road to try, this one supposedly passing directly by the airport, I should certainly be able to find it from there.
      I pulled off, and followed the road right into the heart of the downtown area. as I realized I would never find the airport in the middle of the downtown district, I pulled behind some guy on the side of the road, and asked him where in the hell the airport was. he kindly told me generally how to get back to I-71/75 south, and proceed into northern Kentucky. he explained to me that the "Cincinnati airport" isn't really in Cincinnati at all. If I wasn't pissed before, I was burning hot now. That guy is pretty lucky I was too pissed off to get out of my car, and I was so late meeting my sister that I didn't have time to kick his nice, sincere, helpful ass.
      I quickly found the expressway, and drove quite a while into Kentucky, then again pulled off and asked a gas station attendant to more fully explain where this damn place was. she told me more about how to get there, that I hadn't yet gone far enough away from Cincinnati to get to the Cincinnati airport. with her instruction, I finally found the actual expressway the airport is on, 20+ miles from Ohio. I drove into the airport, parked the car, and was unfortunately so frustrated and in a generally foul mood, that when I found my sister, I gave her the most cursory of greetings and made her carry her own bags to the car. probably due to nearly passing out from heat exhaustion, the rest of the drive home and my memories of the trip in general are pretty hazy and surreal.

to make a long story short (a little late now, I know) I fucking hate Cincinnati, if I meet the people who named the Cincinnati airport I'm going to fucking kill them, and I'm glad my sister is back home, if only for a little while. I did miss her.