wombat_socho

For some reason best known to God and/or their ids, a number of acquaintances who live in the Ninth Circle of Hell* have felt it necessary to inform me of the doings of my ex-wife and her (apparently) soon-to-be-ex.
My general reaction to this is best expressed by the following picture posted last month by P:


More specifically, WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK WERE YOU THINKING? Yes, it's been damn near 14 years since things came to a messy end and I had to resort to some fairly radical reshaping of my headspace to get through that, but my disinterest in the life/death/encasement in carbonite/whatever of the former Mrs. Trainor and the Doormat That Walks Like A Man has not changed one iota. This is for a very good reason that two seconds of logical thought would have brought to mind, but I guess the urge to be the drama llama and spread the (objectively bad) news just kind of did a hard reset of the higher brain functions, huh? Did you really think I was going to be happy to hear this news?

God damn, but y'all gotten confused. You have this picture of me scrawled on the inside of your skull in luminescent Day-Glo paint, but it's not me, not even some kind of weird-ass demented Cubist version of me. Because if it had been, you would have known better and not done this. Worst of all, you weren't even there when all this shit you're telling me about happened. You heard something from Alice who talked to Bob about what Charlie said X told him, with X being either my ex or her most recent husband or my son, who wasted the last year or so of his life playing referee/marriage counselor. You're playing Telephone, and homie is long past playing that game. Include me the fuck out.

I'm not looking for an apology, because that would be meaningless and pro forma and stupid, but I would appreciate it if you never mentioned any of those people to me again. If you want to talk SF (or anime) I guess that'll be okay.

*Sometimes known as the State of Minnesota.

The great thing about Facebook is that it's an endless stream of news, opinion, stupidity and coolness; this is also the bad thing about it, because it's easy to see something and then move on to the next thing without stopping to think too much about it.

So it was that I didn't take the time to write about Peter's Grill closing last month until, in one of my periodic wanderings through my LJ archives, I found this rave review of the place. It brought back a lot of memories. Peter's and I go way back - not all 99 years, of course, but I remember going there before it moved to the Foshay Tower and finally to the US Trust Building on the corner of Second Avenue and Eighth Street South. It was the last of a dying breed, the downtown restaurants that were really oversized diners, serving plain food at a reasonable price in a comfortable (but not TOO comfortable) environment. I remember thinking now and again that one definition of wealth would be having enough money to eat at Peter's every day...and tip the veteran waitresses appropriately, of course. Probably spent way too much money there over the years and ate way too many carbs (aside from the outstanding apple pie) but it was all worth it at the time, and I will miss it badly. Makes me wish I'd been able to get down there for a meal or two on my last few passes through town for Detour, though I know it wouldn't have made any difference in the end.

I'd like to think the Atsidakos family will find someone interested in reopening the place, but I am here now and not there so it really shouldn't matter that much to me. Except it does, because I have a lot of pleasant memories of the place.

The Bleat.:

It’s infuriating how people fade away or sink into the deep, and there’s nothing you can do. There was a Great Divergence many years ago, and the social order forced in the basement of the Valli Pub fractured. Now. You may well think it’s preposterous to assume these things wouldn’t happen, since life consists of such fissures: grade school friends are lost to middle school, high school friends lost in the great new wave of college, college roommates forgotten when the workplace and the post-college claque of 20s-somethings takes over, and then this batch abandoned when kids and the Real Job and all the other anchors of adulthood are draped around your neck.

I know exactly what he's talking about. Because of the splintered time-line of my life, with all its moves and job changes (not to mention the peculiar nature of Minnesotans) there are a lot of people in my life who have just...vanished. I'm pretty sure most of them are still alive; I see traces of some of them on the internet, but they're just out of reach.

The Internet has fixed this to a certain extent, and I am grateful to Facebook for putting me back in touch with some of my friends from high school and the Army; it has also been a useful tool for staying in touch with my Anime Detour and Convergence peeps from Minnesota. Still, there are folks who hover out there somewhere on the internet like satellites in a distant orbit; we're aware of each others' existence but don't talk often, if at all. I wonder how much of that is because I'm not prone to pestering people. If we have stuff in common, then I'm very interested in getting together and doing that stuff, or at least talking about it, but if all we have in common is the fact that we were at the same high school thirty years ago, well, we may not have a whole lot to talk about. I sometimes wonder if this is the reason I'm not that close to my cousins. We've been living different lives in different places and don't have a whole lot in common except for blood. It may be thicker than water, but you can only talk about your relatives for so long.

(moar like Day 1.1, c/d?)

Original plan to get up relatively early, hit the breakfast buffet and see bam2 before leaving for the collation failed utterly. I attended neither of the panels, missed bam2 and the buffet, and wound up eating lunch at Erbert & Gerbert's before boarding the bus to the Stipple collation and arriving half an hour early, much to Jeanne's surprise. Collation was entertaining; it was good to hang out with luned and the other folks and talk about Stuff.

C. showed up right at 1700 and we headed south to Edina and Q.Cumbers; dinner of good quality (and much roughage) was had, and then we went up to her office to do taxes, watch YouTube videos, do taxes, look at stuff in EVE, do taxes, drink tea, and basically act all ADD while taking care of her taxes for the last three years (MN and Fed). Hopefully the state and Feds won't screw her too badly on the penalties and interest. She pressed a couple of CDs on me of Funker Vogt, Combichrist, and some really filthy Russian ska by Leningrad. Reminded me of the famous DLI Obscenity tape, only set to ska music and sung enthusiastically. OMG, is it foul.

Got back to the hotel about 0100 or so in the snow, hung out for a while near ops with gohanvox, geekboyonline, kurai_tsuki, revolutionaryjo and others in various states of drunkenness (or not, as in the case of stuckintraffik and probably dejana) and headed upstairs about an hour or two later. Getting up in a few hours for breakfast will be painful but necessary; tomorrow I hope to actually see more programming, but I suspect this won't happen.

For "school" read "Army", otherwise, this could have been me at any time in the last 25 years.

(NB: for this post and all subsequent posts, IHTFP = "I Hated That Fucking Place".)

So, yeah. The last moving consultant showed up about an hour late this morning, guesstimated the weight of all my books & videos & crap about half a ton higher than the others (except the guy who phoned it in and thereby lost my bidness) and left me with a helpful folder of information and a little tin of mints. Awww.

Sent off applications to PG County this morning. They have vacancies in History, English, and Spanish, so I figure I have a good shot. They're pretty desperate for teachers, by all accounts, but I'm not taking anything for granted. One thing I do need to do is go out and pick up a printer to replace the dead LaserJet (my kingdom for a roller!) and the dead Samsung that actually belongs to Detour. This is because a number of school districts have apparently not figured out that it would be a lot faster and easier for applicants if they could submit their crap over the web instead of having to print it out and mail it in...on the other hand, they probably expect most of their applicants to be local and not from halfway across the country.

It's supposed to be really nasty hot today, up to 95. I'm not looking forward to going out later for drugs, bread, milk and the aforementioned printer, but it's got to be done.

Had to redraft my letter of resignation because my supervisor (and, presumably, other persons at Echelons Above Reality) wanted to know why I was leaving. "Because I want to" was apparently not viewed as a serious response, so I pointed out in the second draft that since I was moving to Virginia, keeping the Customer Accounting position would be impractical. If they ask for another rewrite they're getting the Goonfleet version. In the meantime, they apparently want me to carry on with the normal work routine instead of letting my backup get some more practice in.

The scattered thunderstorms we were supposed to get this afternoon never showed up, so it's now more like home outside. I'm going to hit the pool and then do laundry, assuming the laundry room is clear; also going to set up a fresh batch of sun tea, since I picked up an assload of tea bags at Wal-Mart when I stopped there to replenish the bandage supply.

This is the title of a new book by Michael Zielenziger, who was the Tokyo bureau chief for the Knight-Ridder newspapers in the 1990s. He became interested in the emerging hikikomori problem in Japan, and the book is the result. Has anyone on my f-list (particularly jariten, jiawen, materia_indigo and marainsanity) seen this book yet? If so, what did you think? There's an excellent review of the book at the Chicagoboyz website, and it really makes me want to get hold of the book, which seems to be chock-full of cultural goodness. (Rachel)

Post title also applies to today; it's that time of year when the Great Fusion Bomb In The Sky is especially harsh and shades must be drawn against it.

I didn't get laundry done last night, but I did get most of the dishes done and successfully burned a couple of mix CDs. Progress.

Last, a tech bleg: does anyone know how to make the shift key work to turn off the caps lock in XP? I can do this on my work box, which is running Win2K Pro, and on Cowzilla, which has XP Home, but the Optiplex has XP Pro and I can't find out how to make the shift key unlock caps. It's really playing hell with my typing. :(

Yesterday might as well have been Monday.
( WTF, Mittens? )

As if that weren't enough, apparently the student loan folks have calculated that I need to fork out $666.05 a month to them, which would be pretty laffo if I could actually afford it. That's more than my flipping rent and utility payments added together. *groans* I guess I'll have to get on the horn with them and find out what my options are.

The cherry on top of the steaming shit sundae is some unexpected crap from people I honestly thought better of. Thanks a lot, guys, thanks for giving me another reason to not miss this wretched excrescence of a state when I leave. As if I didn't have enough perfectly good reasons already. Thanks so very fucking much.