2009

This is the day.
So, 2009 has been quite good to me. Nothing really bad has happened, a few wins, a few losses, some frights and some hopes. Nothing really good has happened neither. I have been focused on my job, and even though I have encountered some worrying issues, all went well.

• Family

My brother has a second daughter I haven't seen yet.

My goddaughter walks and swims, starts to speak but no one knows which language. She plays ball and pesters cats. I have seen her once. Time to foster her musical talent ;-)

My father has been diagnosed with cancer, has been adequately treated, or so it seems. His neurological status is clear, as far as Parkinson and other niceties are concerned.
I guess that now that he is "fully" retired, with nothing more than the family business and "cultural" councils to attend, he must find life a tad boring. Of course, spending his days at home with my mother does not help ;-)

My mother is being herself: fastidious and anxious, the winning combo.

• Friends

The Archi is engaged, sort of, plans to move on a town house "with a garden for the cat". I guess that keeping a country house for the afore-mentioned cat wasn't that practical after all ;-)
He has also decided not to eat out with me any longer. Given our track record, this is a wise decision too ;-)

Mr N is busy busy these days. Everything is going well for him. Hard work do pay ;-)
We no longer go to watch films together. My "no pay for parking" policy combined with his culinary tastes and our busy schedules have brought these escapades to an end. Now we eat out to talk and trade gossips. It is going fine.

Mr G is busy busy busy, as if he could live his life in any other way ;-) We meet occasionally, and it is always a pleasure. We do not jump any more. But we should.

The Pickle has a lot on her plate. She gave me much, too much perhaps. I like her a lot, and she is the closest to my ideal woman. I still haven't figured out what I should be doing about her, besides the obvious. One day, we will be running in synch ;-)

Miss S is now living in Canada, engaged, and provided me with some valuable insight before leaving. We are back to our annual email exchange ;-)

Miss Q is in London, having fun before her next jump. Cat woman ahoy ;-)

Mrs A, well, I guess that we are still friends. So everyone seems to believe anyway. I have heard about her here and there. She seems to be doing fine. Were it not the case I would have heard of her.

• Jobs

No new clients, three employees went away, two came in, and I am looking for a third one.

Most people took the economical crisis badly, and started to behave like headless chickens. More than usual I mean ;-) I am at my best in chaos anyway, so let's enjoy the mess they are making ;-) But I guess that I will not last long, so I should really prepare for the end of it. I am getting tired of what I am doing anyway, so I guess that I will have to reinvent myself one more time. I'll tackle that in my 2010 post.

I have been short-listed for promotion. I still have some exams to pass though.

A big client haven't paid me since August. I have noticed that a few days ago, so I guess that I am doing OK ;-)

• Home

My living space is still more an office than a home. It is still ideally situated, and is the place I want to live in.
I wanted to buy it, then I had a long talk with my mother. As usual, she made me aware of a few things. Like the worrying fact that I am more at ease in hotel rooms than in a place I can call mine. That I should work less from home. There is a link there ;-) So, I didn't buy it after all. And I won't till I am clear with myself on these points.

As to my other home by the sea, well, I didn't went there as much as I would have liked.

• Me

I am growing, even though I haven't learned much this year.
I have taken the habit of doing some exercise while watching DVDs. I am not reading as much as I once did. And I am no longer writing.
I try to go for a walk in the woods as often as I can, I find it relaxing. I should really make an habit of it, take the time to do it more regularly.
I have quitted smoking for a few months. Then I have quitted quitting. Now I am aiming for less casual smoking habits. So I am smoking cigars.
My meetings with the Pickle are probably the best things that have happened to me ;-)

Christmas...

... the time of the year when you are supposed to feel guilty when you acknowledge that you are living mostly for yourself ;-)
As if you could live for someone else...

To avoid this, you usually bring gifts and presents, as to atone for our greed. Greed is good ;-)
In more than one way actually :-)

Blow me not!

Well, let me assume my own contradictions.

The first good thing is that I finally know when my turbo kicks in.

The second good thing is that I had completely forgotten how nice and peaceful the woods are when it is snowing.

Blow me!

Yeah!
Snow!
Traffic jams!
Car accidents!
Dumb pedestrians crossing the street with you honking like a mad monkey because you just cannot stop!
Even dumber cyclists taking one way streets the other way while you are trying to stay on it, veering from port to starboard like a drunk yachtsman looking for a buoy!
Total loss Beemers drivers blocking streets!
Drunk postmen and failed courier deliveries!

TEH JOYZ!!!

Well, it is home working for me.
Time to enjoy life's simple pleasures, like staying in my office cum library cum storage hall cum dump cum lab cum apartment, in my boxer shorts, on my couch, optimizing queries on my TV, the occasional balls scratching, cigar, Oreo and hot milk.

This is the life :-)

Or so it should have been.
All was fine and dandy until I started being involved in twenty or so different email threads about business matters with other home workers in four languages, one of them I do not understand ; phone calls about operational matters with people I had no idea which tongue they were speaking in, or what they were speaking of ; and, of course, the usual end of year paper work everyone takes for granted you will take care of while you are slouching at home.

Snow: better when blown.

Guess who...

Yesterday I spent yet another evening with the Pickle. She definitely gets even better each time we meet. Hours without odd blanks, it is quite a performance ;-)

Meeting Miss LD

I have a new neighbour since July or so. She rapidly gained a reputation as a big time psycho bitch. I met her briefly once or twice, and never really had the opportunity to make my own opinion. I grant everyone the benefit of the doubt and I do not usually believe the rumour mill, so I was not appalled but very amused when I was told of her antics. To be completely honest I should also say that I also tend to like queer fish. Let's just say that my purely subjective opinion on the girl based on just hearsay was warily positive.

Last Tuesday, I was happily working from home when someone knocked at my door.
Knocked. Not ringed the conspicuous door bell.
My door. Like just close to where I am sitting, not the lobby.
I was on the phone at that time, so I just shouted that I was not available.
A call, then a another one, then some urgent work, and an hour later I had completely forgotten the incident. I went out to find a note on my door. The writing was chaotic, the meaning absent, it looked like something written by a neurotic parkinsonian high on drugs. From what I had been told, I guessed who it came from. So I returned the favour and went to her door.
She let me in. She was in the process of painting doors, before her birthday party scheduled a few hours later. After having apologised for the mess, she immediately complained about noises. Strange noises coming from "the outside". At first, I didn't heard a thing. Then I did.
Is psychosis contagious? No.
Not usually.
So I looked. It took me the better part of an hour to make her understand that it came from her toilet, a few more time to get her to open the thing, a second for me to nudge the floater. And then... the silence.

My own curiosity made me loose two hours, ruin a coat on paint, "fix" a toilet, listen to some mad ramblings that were not that mad, and meet the psycho.
Not a bad encounter: she is quite nice, in her own strange way ;-)

An afternoon with Miss D.

I met Miss D yesterday for the first time. We exchanged a few emails last week, and scheduled a meeting at a train station. From her emails, I thought that she had been around for a few months at most. I was wrong. And so was most of what I had planned. But we went on revisiting places we both knew, and it gave us the opportunity to acquaint ourselves with our respective tastes. She is definitely into classical-kitsch. She is also a go-getter, which is nice. She lives a full life, which is also nice. And she can talk about it for hours, which is good but a tad tiring. It also turns out that we have quite a few things in common. In fact, the strange thing being that we hadn't met elsewhere before.
The big turn on for me is that we laugh of the same things and share the same kind of humour, which is infrequent.

Big hint: "I never win but professionally.".

Let's try some of my own medicine, and "evaluate on an external scale".
- She looks like the Pickle would, were she blond.
- She has a lot in common with Miss Q in the way she leads her life, with less uncertainties and a bit more stability.
- She reminds me a lot of Mrs. NV: a very similar face and the same gaudy sense of style.
Let's keep it at that: it is starting to look like a comparative cars review.

All in all she seems to be a nice person, but she is not someone I feel attracted too. It is not a physical thing, just her horrible taste. It is funny, for few hours. And unbearable for a few days. I am getting picky in my old age I guess ;-)
Anyway, now that we know of each other we will meet again for sure.
As acquaintances, friends maybe.

Un remède à la mélancolie

Well, two of them actually.







And this gem (my everlasting thanks to Mr. N whose musical taste shines proudly among my own private constellation of odd luminaries ;-).

Strangelove

The people fighting against abortion once had a stroke of genius: they labelled their action "pro life".
How universal.
How noble
Who could be against life itself?
Abortion rights supporters became the de facto PRO DEATH faction. Bad PR ;-)
Well, they decided to fight back, found something more palatable, and named their faction "pro choice". It put a nice spin to it, and it kind of became my litmus test for imbecility. Life and death are pretty simple, on/off, binary concepts, while choice is a question far greater and more complex.
One is an irresponsible oversimplification designed to polarize public opinion, the other is a hard fundamental question that may lead us to inconvenient imperatives.
Guess which is which ;-)

So, when my friends the econazis came up with nice polished marketing slogans like carbon neutral and pro environment, they kind of reminded me of the disturbed retards brandishing foetuses in jars over their head while howling inane slogans you can see demonstrating in front of clinics, right before they decided to bomb the place and kill the staff, all in the name of life, of course.
Nobody is against the environment. To be honest, I suspect that most people do not care and that there are not that many people who are truly concerned about it. But who can say he is against it? Someone with a little bit of honesty may very well say that humanity has made an habit of modifying its environment, that these very modifications made our world and our lives what they currently are. So we literally built our own world to make it agreeable to us, and this is progress. It gave us sapience, science, culture and all of their side effects, good ans bad. Now the same science that we have cherished for so long is telling us that we may have been over indulgent and overlooked some dire consequences. You can doubt science. Hell, you must. This is what it is for.
Correlation is not causation (a lesson the current economic crisis should have made clear to all), most of the effects of the current global warming have been measured for a very short time, and most people do not understand the science anyway. I mean, the chances are good that you, like most people, do not intimately understand why your feet are on the ground. You can answer "gravity", but you cannot explain it, still another empty word covering a very concrete fact. And we are talking about a theory exposed at least three centuries ago. So better not start talking about how some strange gases are behaving in the upper atmosphere and take a leap of faith: the earth is warming, and humanity is doing it.

Or not.
To be honest, I couldn't care less, because it is utterly irrelevant.
What is relevant is that, for the first time since we have won the Third World War, we have a new enemy. Global warming, true or false, is a waking call for us to rediscover a commonality of purpose, a goal and a drive toward progress. So, even if we do not understand it, even if we do not believe in it, let's at least pretend. Better still, take the worst case scenario for granted: there is nothing we can do, the seas will rise, the raging sun will bath all life in lethal radiations, we will start glowing and soon after we will all die (in atrocious pain, of course). We are utterly doomed.
So what?
We were all doomed before. It is not the first time this is happening to us. We have lived for fifty years under threat of nuclear Armageddon, and we are still here to talk about it, brag about it, even regret the time.
So we do as we already did. We find a way out. A way to reverse thing, or adapt ourselves, or adapt our environment or a combination of all that. And we do it fast.
Our present economy is based upon fossil fuel. There is no quick and easy way out of it. Then we better use our dwindling resources carefully and efficiently. We collaborate, communicate, share; organize ourselves.
Find solutions. Fight the circumstances. Haul our methane farting asses out of the stinking pit.

There is nothing like a common enemy to get things moving in the right direction, so let's all be PRO DOOM and enjoy it while we still can :-)

The great unwashed 2

"Women...
Twenty years later, they are all old, tired, petty and dumb.
(waits a few secs, lost in thought)
No, not dumb, not my wife.
Shrewd is the word."

Obsessing

Still another Pickle post.

I have been busy obsessing about the Pickle these last few days. While she isn't usually far out of my mind, it is getting a tad worrying recently. Eventually, it got me thinking. And, as it is natural for an obsession, I went back to old trains of thought and found out that I hadn't followed some of them to the end. I do not assume that I have broken the circle, but I have found some answers.

There was the why questions. Why her, and why am I am not following up. Well, it seems that the answers are linked.
The Pickle is quite different from the persons I am usually attracted to and who are attracted by me. It is quite difficult to say which is which in this case.
When I look at the three women I have been able to live with, they are as far as the Pickle as it can be.
- Mrs A and I had a great competition going on. She rides and shoots better than me, has a nonsensical and rational approach to everything. The friendly emulation was a turn on.
- Miss S is nerdier than me. She even used to keep cue cards about what she wanted to do in bed and documented them afterwards. Even I do not do that.
- Miss Q is a mechanical engineer working as an IT expert in a legal firm. Enough said...
They all have a background in engineering. They are all public tomboys and closet girls, so to speak.
The Pickle is the woman who gets the closest to my ideal notion of what a woman should be that I have found. Of course, I used the word "ideal", which means that it is a very subjective notion and not immune to some self deception. But, anyway, not only does she looks, feel, smells and taste right, she also behaves, moves and talks as she should without it being an act.

So, I am stuck with my own self reinforcing idealisation. I guess that, being my very own construct, I am somehow reluctant to put it to the test and risk breaking it.
Which is exactly what I should be doing.

The great unwashed

The Horde is back, I am besieged.

- "I got sinusoid. It is a pain."
- "Right, you think it gets better then it gets worse."

- "I had to go to the bathroom to laugh."
- "Most peculiar, anatomically speaking."

Rinse and repeat

My father was out of the hospital on Wednesday the 2nd, and back again on Friday. Nothing serious, but still, one wonders why he was allowed to get out when everyone agrees that he should have stayed...

Anyway, if grumpy mood is a symptom of good health, he is ready for a marathon ;-)

Blood and guts

Today, I went to see my father at the hospital. The intervention went well: everything that had to be removed is supposed to be so. Of course, we are still waiting for the biopsy results...
He was quite well for a few hours, then they had to inject some isotopes solution in his bladder to make sure that everything that shouldn't be there is killed, think of it as baby chemo.
It didn't went well.

I am hardly a qualified medic. My last "first aid" lesson was in SERE and ended by "... and if there are too much guts outside, just put it back in and make sure not to make any knots or twists, then glue the whole thing. It is bad, but your buddy's insides are supposed to be sceptic. If they aren't, you are in a deeper kind of shit." (sic). I have never had any trouble with these lessons. I have never had any trouble with blood, spilled guts or other gory conditions. The only thing is that I have always felt bad when seeing my own blood, especially when I am not in pain. Other people's blood was supposed to be a manageable situation.
Well, I have learned something today: seeing your own father slowly emptying his blood in a sterile pocket *is* troubling.

Smoke and mirrors

Yesterday, my dad was diagnosed with cancer. All things being considered, the situation is far less dramatic than I may have thought. He fainted twice a few weeks ago, and given the family history of neurological diseases and cancers, I was thinking of a brain tumour at worst, Parkinson at best ; if you can call it best...
So the hospital rounds started, and his neurological status came up just a little bit off in places but normal. What was discovered is what may very possibly be cancerous tumours in the bladder and kidneys. So he is scheduled for surgery later today. Then we will see.
I was hoping for a partial anaesthesia, but it will have to be general.

I do not have a good track record in dealing with the death of people close to me. In fact, it is a pretty bad one. This may be why I have never, to that day, really envisioned his death, except in a very abstract manner.
Professionally speaking it will be a life changing event to me. Which is not really the point actually, as I feel confident that I will be up to the tasks at hand if need be. I won't say that I will enjoy this new situation, but I know that I will be able to manage it.
No, what is worrying me most is to have to deal with the event itself: having to face my loss while caring for my mother, dealing with my brother, the family, the friends. It took us eighteen hours to put the final touch to an already set up legal procedure. Following up on it while grieving will not be easy to me. I am a bad griever. I do not quit. I do not forget. I am still missing people dead for more than twenty years. And I take the initial loss very badly. I know that I should not be a mess, but I also know that I will be.

Very egoistically, I just hope that everything will turn out to be OK, that we are on time for a cure to be possible, that everything is fine and always will be. That my dad will always be there for me, that he will still be there to see how what he has done is progressing, provide his own insight on things that matter to us, be there as he is.

Pickly feelings

Sorry for letting you loose one precious year of your life when you needed it most.
Really.

Thank you Apple

Now I can run Oracle on Trusted Solaris on Parallels on my 27 inches quad-procs TV, run a real time back-up database while watching In Treatment.
A lifetime achievement :-)

A pity iTunes synch is such a mess though...

Picky Pickle

Still another pleasant evening with the Pickle.

She is a true friend, gives me perspective and insight I wouldn't get on my own on personal matters. She offers me advice, doesn't judge me, is even better than I initially thought.

With her I am like this guy banging his head on a wall who, when asked why he is acting like that, answers: "I feel so good when I stop!". Except that nobody is asking me that and I never get to the punchline. I am no longer hurting, just numb. And the best part is that I am the only one responsible for it.
As usual ;-)

Impulse

- Can't you just say or do something on impulse?
- Sure. Regretting not to have said or done something on impulse comes to mind ;-)

I don't like sex

Shocking, but true.
Well, not exactly true, but true enough for what I want to say ;-)

Once upon a time, a long ago, I had this undergrad philosophy lecture by some paedocommiescumtard, the kind to give you a D when you dared to bring Marcus Aurelius and Berkeley, with an ounce of Clausewitz and Bradley just for the humoristic touch to his Tom Wolfe dissertation. Yes, I do have the humour gene too. I mean, Tom f*cking Wolfe, what can you say to that? The guy must have thought something along the lines of "Weeeell, given this audience I will start it slow and looow.".
The guy was a moron, probably still is. He should be giving lectures on José Bové or Nicolas Hulot now.
But, anyway, he got one thing right. He had this metaphor he called "the window shopping effect". It went like this: "You are a child a few days before Christmas. You are in town with your parents and you walk along a toy store. In the window, displayed for all to see, you see the most wonderful toy ever, but you cannot touch it, you can only look and gape in wonder. So the next few days you go on pestering your parents for that toy. You really want it, but you believe you will never have it: it is too great a toy to be ever given, it belongs to the window. Then comes Christmas, and you finally get it. You play with it for a few moments, and it looses most of its appeal.".

I must be a child at heart: for me lust is still the better part of sex ;-)

Skydiving

Almost three years since I have jumped out of a plane, and suddenly it hit me.
Why do I like it?
I mean, there are better ways to prove yourself. I guess that, for many years, I was kind of blinded by what brought me to it: a bet between friends. So it must have been a question of dare, of showing, of practically demonstrating your worth to your peers.
Right. It may have been so for the first jump, but what kept me coming?
And I finally found out. What I liked most are those two or three seconds where you have absolutely no control, when you are being played by the wind, when you are in something bigger and stronger than yourself. Of course, the whole point is to get control back, I wouldn't be here to talk about it if it weren't for that. There is a huge sense on accomplishment there.
But still, the best part is losing control, allowing yourself to be at risk. Being alone, responsible for you alone, and letting yourself be blown away.
Survival is just a technical matter, the important part is to be willing to risk it ;-)

Generation ZX

Even though my education has been quite socially permissible, I am forced to admit that it conveyed extremely conservative values. Imparting this teaching must come naturally I guess when you are sincerely convinced that you are the best there is and that nothing comes to prove you wrong. Still, I wonder.
I wonder how it came to be. Surely, my grand-parents social outlook was progressive, for their own time. And my own parents had their own rebellious streak. Me, I do not have much care for social issues per se. Current global issues, like climate change or globalisation have little to no appeal to me. Maybe it is because I understand fully that there is a system that will take care of them, as long as there is someone to have faith in it. For me, they are merely management issues, not political choices ; purely tactical or operational questions, not a matter of strategy: we already know that the battle is taking place, where, when and how ; the only questions that remain are "implementation details", where the Devil lays ;-)
No, me, I am a generation ZX man. To exaggerate a bit, I would say that at nine I knew more processors intimately than people. That at twelve I spoke more machine languages than human ones. So it is no wonder if my very own rebellion takes place where "purely managerial" issues are encroaching on basic human dignities. Of course, giving everyone a single unique ID is a great facilitator of administrative matters. But still, the potential for abuse is huge, and we are not talking about just potential now. Yes, the Internet is wonderful media, but its commercial uses are increasingly threatening the freedom and anonymity that are making it appealing in the first place. I can go on for hours on these matters.
So, yes, I am a generation ZX man, the product of my time and education. My Geraderichtung, so to speak, may not be yours but I know fully well where my path is and how to tread it ;-)

Respect

- "Don't you have any respect?"
- "Respect is such a strong word. Let's say that I grant you the benefit of the doubt, and credit you with some consideration, as I would do to anyone. Be careful though: you are burning it at an alarming rate."

Proximity killed the video shop

I do not watch TV. I do not even have a TV for that matter. But I love watching movies. I used to go to small theatres, follow retrospectives, see new things. Then time got sparse, DVDs ubiquitous and I went to a DVD rental shop. I picked them randomly to watch on my laptop, what did I have to loose? At worst I go still go on working or browsing in another screen, do some callisthenics or whatever took my fancy if the film was not to my liking and still be able to pause, rewind or play back if an half seen image or some dialogue seemed to warrant my attention.
I started to skip the trailers on old DVDs, then on recent ones too. Soon, I was out of touch. So I asked the clerk for advice. Rental shops clerks are usually knowledgeable: what do you think they do between collects, except watching movies, lots and lots of them? It doesn't grant them taste, but you soon learn to know them, and quickly find someone whose advice you can trust. At first, I was reluctant to rent series. It all changed when I was made to discover the Sopranos. Then the Wire, then Dead like Me. Then 6 feet under and a few others. Things I wouldn't even have considered worth seeing. I even discovered Grey's Anatomy, the best gym track ever ;-)
Now the shop nearby is closing, forced out of business by a supermarket: they sell at rental prices. I guess that I will have to find some other place to go for advice.

16. Forever. Nooo ;-)

This time, our annual sea food frenzy ended up quite well, all things being considered.

No near fatal miss, no indignities, no puking, just happy being there. Then I let my guard slide a few minutes and the next thing I know is that we avoid being thrown out of a bar. Well, I should know that the Archi trigger pull becomes quite light when he is heavily loaded ;-)
Not that I was in pristine condition myself ;-)
Buuut, when compared with past editions, we are progressing ;-)
Practice makes perfect, as they say ;-)

The Pickle

I have a few entries in my backlog about the Pickle.
Lengthy ones.
And more than a few actually.
I won't post them.

The best part of them is "Definitely, our best dates are our worst evenings. Or the other way around ;-)". I won't publish the rest because I have been yoyoing for more than a year now, and it doesn't get any better.

Let's just stay that, for someone who has breached the three months barrier only thrice in his life, who usually does not go past the three days barrier, feeling such a deep and enduring infatuation is, well, hard, for lack of a better word. It is hard because I do not understand what I am feeling and why. It is hard because I do not do what I should do, what I am expected to do, I am driving myself nuts second guessing.
"Never give up on someone you can't go a day without thinking about." as they say. I don't deal in half measures, even with my own patheticness.

I am a nazi.

It is official: the local ecotard comrades say so.

Nothing infuriates me so much as cretinous nekulturnies with a taste for political irresponsibility. Sooo they are against nuclear energy because, well, it is bad you know. In fact they are against progress or anything that is not co2 neutral, except for themselves, of course, the farting idiots.

Well, I had the perfect solution for them: proven technologies, existing and easy to replenish resources, easy to understand and implement, existing roadmap, complete reliability, effectiveness that may be favourably estimated by any current model, just a bad name: genocide.
Ok, we the people, I mean, the people who really matter, may start by nuking, say the Middle East and southern Mediterranean areas. South American urban areas too. Let nature take care of Africa and South Asia. You will need ready to irradiate slaves in the Middle East anyway to sustain your lifestyle.
And bingo, we are teh winzorz.
And Gaia, she loves us.
Less humans = less ecological pressure.
QED.
Morons.

Ok, ok, I shouldn't have pushed them so hard. I should have kept it at "Given your goals, it leaves you with two non mutually exclusive solutions: repression or genocide." and refrain from elaborating.
Well, I guess that I won't change, me bad :-)

The good thing was the laugh I had seeing their faces. The bad one is the cute little thing who brought me there.

"Meet new people, talk to them, rub their noses in their own shit": my new motto for social exploration :-)

A few evenings with Miss J

Miss J contacted me on this social cum tests site where I keep an infamous profile.

This profile has no pic, a lot of chaff and just shouts "Dangerous psycho inside, keep out!". I am obviously quite proud of it. It is truly a monument dedicated to bad taste, tongue in cheek and the fact that, "on the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog".

So, when I get a hit, usually once every year or so, I ready myself for either a good laugh or a really good surprise, like Miss Q two years ago. Well, this time I was in for the Clown Academy. Karma is a bitch ;-)

Not that I have anything against dumb little tarts. Dumb psycho little tarts with delusion of grandeur and an utter inability to get their stories straight is where I put the limit.
The first thing that went wrong was when she insisted on following a "straight online dating course", meaning, emails, chats, phone conversations then meetings. If emails are ok, mediated real time communications at a somewhat intimate level with someone I do not know are not. I am not that good with intimacy in the first place, and pretending to build a virtual one is beyond me. The trouble is that I am good at pretending and very curious too. The more inconsistencies I get, the curiouser I become.

So, in the end, I had a few good evenings, I laughed quite a bit, and my ignore list got incremented.

Getting what you...

So, Super Dumb is demoted and got assigned to some other hole in the earth, I do not wish to know where, I am just satisfied knowing it is far and away from here.

It made me happy for, say, a day.
Then I had to face the consequences, meaning finding someone to work his shift. With the holidays, "prophylactic reserve restrictions" and other circumstantial shit, I had no one available, so, I am stuck doing the moron's shi(f)t, stuff I had not been doing for years and never wanted to go back to, just when I do not have time for it. As usual, I am stuck doing what I must.

Somehow I cannot escape the feeling that I deserve this...

Backlog

Long time no see, he ;-)

Time to purge my backlog I guess.

I may have been a tad overworked these last weeks, but I have had the time to write on my phone, sometimes because I just had to, some other times while waiting, usually in a restaurant. Most of these are unfinished, and quite raw. However, if I do not do this now, I will let this blog die, so here it goes.

Camus DTC2

http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=474

Camus DTC

Super Dumb

-"Is it a bird?
Is it a plane?"
-"No, it is a bug.
And far less annoying than the one living in your skull, you MORON!"

How can you be like that? It is unbelievable. I, for one, wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't had the colossal misfortune of meeting you. You are on Earth just to make me loose faith in the human race. But now I got it: you are not even human. No, you are a shape shifting slug from Antares sent to conquer us. Your overlords have modelled you from early TV transmissions, you are coming straight out of "I love Lucy", without the tired laugh factor.
The scary thing is that you are a father. For the third time.
Seriously, what did you think you were doing? Lasagna?

You are dumber than a dead tree trunk. At least the jungle niggers may have used it to pass information, sculpt a totem, make something beautiful. You are only fit to pass viruses, the worst being your infective idiocy. Your super power is "terrifying befuddlement". Nobody can bear to believe that you may be so stupid. They just assume that they have made a terrible mistake, that they must be missing something, and they just let you go on and on.
Were you mine, I would kick your ass so hard that all the fat would go up, expel all the shit up there and make you something like a brain.

I have met oysters with more character, punch and intellect than you.
But, I'll grant you that, you are an hidden gem. Of the hidden fossilized snot kind.

I have never felt this way for anybody. The only thing you have ever managed to create in your whole worthless life is hate. In me.
Your utter lack of professional and human skills is far beyond what may be expected of a worm dangling from a hook. Even it has some use.
You have not. You are just a waste. It would be bearable if you kept it to yourself, but no, you have to display and practice your abysmal cretinism and make me loose my time. You are totally unacceptable in my work environment, and, as far as I am concerned, in any place fit
for mankind.

You are beyond hope, redemption and healing.

I hate you. Truly.

Ahhh, feeling better :-)
It just had to come out.

no life (continued)

The good thing about being overworked and besieged by the great morons' horde is the conversation.

-"Do you often go shooting people in the streets?"
-"No, not in Europe. (waits a sec, thinking) For now."

The girls are talking about clothes, one of them then says that she likes Esprit jeans.
-"Comme la tête dans le cul quoi."
-"Mais non, à l'envers!"

Another girl is eating some stinking fish.
-"Smells like my girlfriend coming back from camp."
-"Your girlfriend is a girl scout leader?"
-"Not a leader, no."

-"My wife has lost two stones."
-"Good for her."
-"Now I can see my watch when I hug her."
-"Sterling performance. Carry on."

Getting old

This thing is actually my mother's birthday present to my father.
We do have the humour gene.

Bunker Palace Hotel: The People under the Stairs

"Urbi et hourdis"
Lame.
I know ;-)

no life

It has been two hard weeks since they hatched. A little bit before the kittens and a few weeks after the swallows is the time of the morons. It is a seasonal phenomenon. One usually anticipates their arrival by preparing a few traps: they are not really mean, just vastly annoying. I do not know why, but this year, oh boy, did they come in force: potently, from everywhere, and in large numbers. You cannot escape, you cannot run, you just have to deal with them. They are protecting their budgets, their projects like a mother hen on steroids. And they are truly unbearable.

As the Archi would put it, they are somewhat like penguins: overrated, gregarious, striving in the worst possible environment at the worst time, too stupid to make the difference between an egg and a rock, insufferably noisy and their dumbness has a kind of Nietzschean quality that makes it almost attractive. Better not stare too much into it...

On a train to nowhere

It is funny how the same subject sometimes comes up again and again in widely different contexts, and how seeing the same thing under different lights gives you insight. These days it seems to be how we compartmentalise our live(s).
I had separate talks about this with a colleague and two friends. One of these friends, Mr G., is a past colleague of mine. We do not work in the same line any more, and while we do have a professional relationship beside our comradeship, we no longer need to compartmentalise our lives. But we still do. Old habits die hard. We talked about it, and our conclusion was that our shared experience most intense moments happened when we were playing the Game. So, for us, it is a bounding behaviour, a deadly serious private joke of a kind.
Looking at it in different contexts made me think, which is always dangerous for me ;-) Compartmentalisation has many flavours: it goes from behaving differently depending on who you are with, a thing we all do, consciously or not, to living different lives. It has many causes too: from it being part of your job, to a comfort option you choose to be polite. Whatever the how and why, doing it is not that hard when you have the right aptitude and, possibly, training. It is in fact surprisingly easy. The trouble comes when you have to merge: filling these blank spots in your live, your CV, telling without compromising. This is what they never tell you: you may go back, but never fully. Up to a point, there will always be a part of your backstory you will have to stick to, however small it is. The trouble is that a backstory is just a mean to an end. And you do not want to be just a mean.
Except if you are a true bastard, of course ;-)

An evening with Miss E.

Miss E., E stands for "Emboutie" here, and I met by accident, literally: I bumped into her car a few years ago. She is petite, has very short hair and a big smile full of teeth. I took her to lunch while we were filling the forms. I think that what brought us close was our common way to react to stress: with a cheer. Apart from that, there was not much. She introduced me to Flemish contemporary literature (translated, of course ;-), I introduced her to independent Nordic cinema (translated too;-). It went on for a few months. It was fun, went nowhere fast, and eventually arrived. Once this phase was over, we used to meet accidentally at cultural events and lost touch two or three years ago.
I lost her phone around that time, and my number had changed too, so her call came as a surprise.

So we met at one of our old haunts, and did what I do best: I listened. What she had to say was quite unimportant: she had a garden party a few weeks ago, wanted to invite me, was unable to reach me, met a common acquaintance and got my new number. We talked about the years gone by, her funny family, her job, her pets and her new house. Apart from that, all had already been said long ago, and none of us apparently wanted a rerun. Apparently being the keyword here for reserved persons such as us, I had to make myself subtly clear. As I do not usually do subtle, all I can hope for is not to have given confused signals. All in all, it was a somewhat pleasant evening.

A lunch with The Man Who Rules The World

TMWRTW has unbounded ambition, passionate dreams, expresses his ideas emphatically, limited support, reluctant funding, and uses charisma violently: if it does not work he pours some more. TMWRTW cannot stop dreaming, talking about his dreams and is perfectly immune to reality.
The Man Who Rules The World cannot even rule Himself.
Sometimes, I am getting tired of runaway horses...

Miss I?

Once again, I have spent a delightful and insightful evening with The Pickle.

The Pickle seems to have developed a liking to "Il n'y a pas mort d'homme.", something I told her a few weeks earlier. Apparently, she is eluding the whole sentence, which went approximately like "Nobody's dead, nobody's harmed, your team is not at fault, you did nothing wrong: no harm, no foul.". Be wary of elisions: they tell more than they hide...

Among the insights of the day are the fact that I probably should try to consider my relationship to my brother through different lenses, and that I probably should strive to being impartial when he is concerned. I do not fully like the idea, but her comments made me realise that I was indeed missing a few key points here, so she is most probably right.
She pointed out that I probably should try to envision the place where I am living not like an office cum squat, but as a living place, which is very true too.
She also remarked that I do not let the initiative go out of my hand easily. Now, it may seem true, and I must admit that it is generally so, but it is a strange one nonetheless in this particular context.

Now comes the weird part. We were partaking in the usual end of evening conversation, when I asked her whether she liked her apartment. She immediately entered defensive counter mode, told me that I was messing with things I was not concerned with, that she didn't questioned my own choices and then asked in substance why I was being so confrontational. I just told her that the way she talked about her apartment reminded me of the way she talked about her last job: highlighting the negative points and mulling over them. She was on the brink of going ballistic, starting by "Is this how you deal with inconveniences? Just by moving away from them?" when we were saved by an incoming phone call. I took my leave, her last words being "You really have a way to shift the tides.". So, no, the end was not good.

As to this defensive reflex cause, I can only guess. And my first guess would be that I am not the first one to ask her the very same question, possibly highlighting the fact that this very place was a contentious point. My second guess would be that she has not gone over this place context, and that her emotional involvement is still quite high, which is perfectly normal given what I know of the afore mentioned context. My third guess would be that she is expecting something of this place, perhaps a reassurance in the fact that her environment is steady. My fourth guess is that she does not want to be seen or see herself as a quitter. Only guesses anyway, but I would very much like to get to the bottom of this issue, or, to be honest, I would like her to go to the bottom, and to the bottom's bottom while she is at it but that is for her to do, and I kind of suspect that she is not really in the mood for this. Which is a shame for such a nice person to put herself in such a predicament. Then again to each one his own cross. And God only knows how dearly we love our crosses ;-)

Were it not for this phone call, I suspect that I would not have been able to "shift the tides" once more and leave on speaking terms. I was ready to tell her that I indeed do not leave things as they are, moving away when they get inconvenient or uncomfortable, but that I do not mull over them either, because I know why I am where I am, how much I had worked, what I had to sacrifice and renounce to to be there, and that when you are experiencing inconveniences, the only way not to throw away your effort is to put some more effort on top of it. Then, we would have gone into the whole "I am just emotional, you are too logical" argument over again. Not that this argument is pointless, it is indeed very relevant, but taking it headfirst won't take us, or at least me, any further...

Perhaps, just perhaps, is The Pickle a pickle to herself. As we all are, to some extent ;-)

Meeting Mrs. F.

- "I have had a dream about you last night."
- "Huhuh"
- "It was funny."
- "Yup, I usually do that."
- "What?"
- "Make people laugh... in their dreams."

15-15, I guess ;-)

As the Pickle will soon say, I do have a way to shift the tides.

Thinking outside of the room.

Yesterday's last BBQ was a family affair scheduled to be over by midnight. At around 0015 everything has already been packed up and three friends and I were chatting in the kitchen. Then Mrs N. came up with this:
"There is a closed room with three lights in it. On the outside of the room are three switches, one for each light. However, from where the switches are you cannot see the lights. You are free to operate the switches. Associate the switches and lights, but you may enter the room only once."
It is supposed to be a classical enigma, but none of us had heard it before. Anyway, with more than 20 years in combined engineering schooling (and more than a few glasses of wine), it took us the better part of an hour to solve it.
Never underestimate the power of fresh wine on a warm night ;-)

Converted

- "It's well below 9.5 miles per gallon."
- "How much is it in litres for a hundred kilometres?"
- "You know, Europe would be a really nice place, were it not for this damned metric system."
- "Tell me about that engine again."
- "It's a 310 hp 6.8 li... Bastard :-)"

Killing in the Name of

As Mr. G. put it: "We are what we are because we can afford it."

It doesn't make it any nicer, but brings some satisfaction.

Moo

Sometimes, testing is like watching trains.

I am like a tesseract: spongiform.

A country evening

Mr. C. & Mrs A. live in the country. Not exactly the country, but not the suburbs either. Let's say that they are living in a particularly green suburb, or the concrete country, take your pick. I have known them for fifteen years, and while not deep green, they have always had ecological penchants. They were the first to travel the city by bike, day or night, the first to have an hybrid car, and now they have a potager garden and tiny greenhouse that smells good of tomatoes. Of course, their house is a non-smoking area.

Around 0100, Mr. T. and me were smoking and chit-chatting in the dark, close to the greenhouse, when Mrs. A. came by putting a headlamp on her brow and looking into her jumpsuit pockets. She found some tobacco and began to roll a cigarette, fully concentrated on her task.

- Mr T. "What are you up to?"
- Mrs. A., spitting some tobacco "Looking for slugs."
- Mr. T. "What for?"
- Mrs. A., lightning her cigarette "Kill'em."
Mr. T. and me exchanged a blank look.
"Then" went Mrs. A. "I cut'em and leave the pieces around. The fuckers eat each other, so I can come by half an hour later and have some more to kill."

Rinse and repeat ;-)

The empty Room

Once upon a time, in the distant province of a far away land, was a castle with an empty room. In this castle lived, of course, a princess. It so happens that she liked to go hunting. She did not really like to hunt, but she loved the horses and hounds, she liked to have a jolly good time together with the other hunters, and she enjoyed riding along the forest many paths in the shades, among the birds and the trees. Each and every day, she went hunting, came back to her castle late in the afternoon, strolled its halls and towers, before she went to sleep, making sure the spells that kept her castle clean and neat had worked as to ready the castle for the darkness to come. In her dreams, she filled the empty room, often with joy and laughters, or songs and dances, rarely with cries and tears, because she was cheerful even when she dreamt. At sunrise, she would often give a passing thought to her dreams as she was waking up, but soon the hunt was on her mind, and a-hunting she went.

One evening, as she passed by the empty room, she saw a mouse lying right in its dead centre. She looked at it, saw the blood and knew enough about these things to understand that it was freshly killed. Slightly disgusted, she took it by the tail, went to a window and threw it to the moat. As she turned toward the door she discovered a cat next to the doorstep, looking smug and somewhat amused, licking its front paw. She went to the cat, and as she approached it looked up at her, a twinkle in the eyes. She petted it, and went toward her room. As she walked, she looked back and saw the cat following her. The cat was well mannered, so it waited for her to have found her sleeping position, slightly curled on her side, to jump on the covers, scratch a little, purr appreciatively, then snuggle close to her back, radiating warmth and contentment. When she waked up, the cat was no longer at her side. Thinking nothing of it, as it was a very clean cat that left no mess, she went on following her daily routine, already anticipating gossips and chit-chats, expecting to see nice hound work and to take part in a fine chase.
A few days later, the same thing happened: a dead mouse in the empty room, and the same cat sitting there silently, a study in feline smugness. And she did as she already had: threw the mouse away, gave the cat a stroke, allowed it on a cover. And so it went for months, the cat appearing on its feline whim.

Then, one day, the game deserted the forest, victim of an ancient curse, and the hunt was cancelled. The princess took it all in one stride, acknowledged that she was becoming tired of the old hunt anyway and busied herself with preparing for a new one.
On this day, as she entered the empty room which contained still another dead mouse, she turned toward the cat, and, for the first time, addressed it "You know, you shouldn't really be bringing dead mice in here."
- "You talking to me?" said the cat.
- "But... how inordinate! A talking cat!"
- "But... how inordinate! A talking princess!"
- "Oh my, talking and cheeky too. Cats do not talk, I know it: I have had cats before, and none of them talked."
- "Then perhaps am I not a cat."
- "Sure you are: you look like one, you purr, you scratch covers, and you bring me dead mice. For which I thank you by the way."
- "Think nothing of the mice, my pleasure really. Besides, you do not seem to like them anyway."
- "I find them somewhat disgusting to be honest, but I like having a cat around to take care of the live ones, so thank you for that."
- "Thank back to you then, for giving me a warm spot to stay."
- "The least thing I could do really, it is not like I am giving you anything, it is just the way I am."
- "You are in a most gracious way then."
- "Cut the purr will you, and tell me, why are you bringing them to me? It is not like there is any rodent shortage anywhere in the realm."
- "I just told you: you are in a most gracious way. While you are not the only person I bring mice to, I must say that you are my favourite one: you smell good, you look good, you know enough about hunting, you even have a nice voice when you care to talk. There are very few people like you. And you have this empty room."
- "My, this is not really what I expected, coming from you."
- "Then let's just say that you do not roll over in your sleep and that you do not snore too loudly. Cattish enough for you?"
- "Well, I asked for it, so I cannot really complain, can I? And how does this room come into this?"
- "I do not like messes, so it seemed to be a better place than, say, your library or dressing room."
- "Thank you for your attention. However I like this room to be empty."
- "May I ask you why?"
- "You see, it is the last room I visit before I go to sleep, so I can dream of how I may arrange it."
- "Indeed, I see." said the cat knowingly, "Let's furnish it then, so I can learn about furnitures and you may dream other dreams."
- "Not so fast. I do not need you cat to help me 'furnish' my room with dead voles or whatever you may have caught."
- "Well, you said it yourself: cats do not talk. So carefully consider this: perhaps am I not a cat and thus can I find something more suitable, if you would but tell me how you wish this room to be. Consider also that I didn't exactly offered you my help, did I ? I am just like you in a way: I just do what feels natural, it is just the way I am."
- "Cats are cats, talking or not. And I wish this room empty, thank you."
- "Of course, cats are cats as princesses are princesses and as dreams are dreams, how obvious." laughed the cat "And as I cannot guess what you may been dreaming of, I can merely bring you what I already have. I think I should take my leave now. Let me know if you ever need more mice."

So the cat who talked went away, circled the castle three times pensively.
On the first round, he thought that perhaps he should learn to listen more attentively to what is being said to him, and just learn to give up. But felines do not loose easily he told himself, and he was very sure of being right anyway.
On the second one, he thought that it was not always easy to tell people what you had to tell them. And even though you may have a very precise idea of what you mean, tailoring it to suit your audience for your message to be both understood and accepted does not always come naturally.
On the third one, he pondered the virtues of being a cat, wondered whether he should go back to being a wizard, a knight or an owl, or perhaps try something new like travelling merchant, priest or fox. Then he saw a young rabbit, fresh out of its warren, thought "Fast clueless food!" and jumped it.

When a cat comes to your house, bringing mice or birds, let it be: it is but a cat. It is not helpful nor needy, it is just being a happy cat. However, when it starts talking to you, it is a sure sign you should wake up. But you already knew that I am sure ;-)

Bunker Palace Hotel: View from a Kill

Backside

Frontside

Getting vectorized by The Pickle

I have just spent another very pleasant afternoon and evening with The Pickle.

Despite our seemingly irreconcilable outlooks on life, love, politics and almost everything else actually, it seems that we are according the same value to being humane, but probably not for the same reasons. What is nice with someone like her is that you always end up with some insight, not always that easy to see because it is most often lost in contrast. It is getting to the point where I sometimes feel that we have a semantically understandable conversation that we are understanding in very different ways: it is like we are sharing the same language but not its meaning. Weird. Well, "I like weird!", as Mrs R. would say. Anyway, we are both too kind for our own good.

The hardest thing to do is not giving up on your dreams, it is just to understand that you are dreaming. Waking up is easy then. I guess that this goes for both of us.

So, when someone tells you "So, are you giving up?", never, ever, answer "No, I am just giving you the opportunity to give in. Because I truly do not know what else I can do.", just stay silent. Because you haven't given up on your dreams, you are just conceding that while someone might have been wrong, you just do not really know who. Maybe you, maybe not you, maybe both of you, maybe none of you. Of course, this attitude implies that you have no regret whatsoever. And I do not have the slightest one.

I do not feel any different toward her. I do not feel that I am giving up. I just feel empty. Not like I have failed, because failing implies that we where both playing the same game. It is more like one is playing cricket with a mallet and the other polo with a bat, both on the same field, trying to figure out the rules and each one always scoring according to its own standard. Meeting not like trains in the night, but like a horse ad a greyhound pulling up the same cart, so to speak. I'll let you figure out who is who ;-) I just feel that it has all been meaningless and vain, while still being instructive without having exactly grasped what it was all about. Which is a shame really, as I have been the one who initiated the whole thing and kept it going ;-) So I guess that The Pickle and I will stay friends and that time will tell. Most probably not much, as Chronos, by virtue of having three mouths, knows better than anyone that silence is golden ;-)

In a way, were The Pickle to be a sorting algorithm, she would never break the nlogn barrier. Always comparing, never evaluating to an external scale (TM someone, fuzzy reminiscence). But, then again, efficiency is not always the name of the game, and is heavily dependant on context anyway.

All in all, when all is said and done, what is left? Am I hurt? No. Do I bear shame or regret? No. Would I do the same again? Yes. Should I do the same again? Probably not. Do I want to do the same again? Yes. Why shouldn't I be doing the same thing again? Because I could find more efficient ways to achieve a similar end.
But we all know that it is not always all about efficiency, don't we? We all know that it is about being, willing and feeling, none of them being particularly efficient in its own right.

So, to a good night and a good friend: may we grow in understanding while still being different enough to be able to amaze and befuddle each other. Cheers to that ;-)

Is it a swine, is it a maddened cow?

No, with 90% scientific certainty.

I guess that the remaining 10% beg to differ, God only knows why ;-)

Cold

This has been going on till yesterday afternoon, but some symptoms where already there Friday evening. I hate this state: snotty, coughing, feverish, remotely coherent, and, above all, this damn torticollis that comes and goes.
Then, I am not the only one I guess.

Tell me about cold comfort...

Indulgence weekend

Yup, I have been busy indulging myself , big time ;-) Well, let's just say that I haven't done the least thing productive.

So, yesterday the boys were in town, a fourth of them, so we went a-whiskeying, a-cigarring and a-talking till there was nothing more sensible to say. Mister G. was his usual entrepreneurial self, going to visit his dominions in outer Czekia or whatever, while Mister R. was in FO hush-hush mode "somewhere East". Got some news about Mrs. A. and the HR gal along the way. They left for Paris this morning, led by the ineffable Mister R. who was once known to have misled us three times in a row in landnav exercises. Some things never change ;-)

After a lengthy hydration, I have decided to begin the latest Weber, and trolling weird sites. And now it is siesta time.

An evening with Miss Q

Yup, Miss Q, her choice, not mine ;-)

I have met Miss Q on a "social cum tests" site two years or so ago. She actually contacted me, which takes some guts as my profile there is best described as an exercise in psycho weirdness. Anyway, as she contacted me and as we were on top of each other "match list" the least I could do was to be polite and we ended up dating for a few months last year. Miss Q is another exception. I like to see her as "one of the boys", even if the doppelgänger factor is quite high. She does not like to jump out of plane for fun and profit: she likes to jump out of lives. An engineer by trade, she is working in legal, likes a fun spank and spends her time generating her own "Nacht und Nebel" effect. She is not forthcoming, but quite talkative when put on the right track, is not that social but goes well along, and treads a fine path between laugh and duty. So, yes, whatever matching algorithm they are using there, they were quite right in their computations: we had no trouble relating, our basic outlook is similar on many points and complementary on most of the other. In the end however, she proved to be even too weird for me, which is telling.

Anyway, it was a nice evening: we had a lot to say after not seeing each others for the better part of a year, then we talked about common acquaintances, traded restaurants addresses and parted with a smile, which is, all things being equal, the most satisfying ending possible.

An evening with The Pickle

The Pickle and I are going way back, fifteen years or so. Friend of a friend of a friend, we used to meet once or twice a year, acquaintances at most, with nothing really significant going on. We lost touch, met again, no reason why it should not go on any differently. Not so. As to why, I do not know. She wouldn't be The Pickle if I knew. Let's just say that before her, I knew five kinds of women: part of the scenery, colleagues, agreeably dumb little tarts, doppelgänger girlfriends and confidantes. It is more four than five actually, because the doppelgänger girlfriend invariably becomes a confidante after six months to a year, when we have to agree that being so similar does not lead us to anything. The Pickle, well, she does not fall into these. As I hate exceptions, being just wired to systematize, and as I cannot make her fit my own preconceptions, it could be an explanation. Or perhaps is it that she is just way out of my usual, despite having most of what I am looking for. So, I guess, that The Pickle is a pickle because I just cannot find a way to relate unambiguously to her in a way that is both satisfying and efficient. "Efficient", she would utterly hate this word when applied to a relationship, she who readily reproaches me to call an infant or someone an "it" (well, it may be a conceptualisation/translation issue, as I usually phrase it as in "I have met someone, it was interesting.", but then again one might say that this phrasing is ambiguous). You see, The Pickle tells about herself that "I do not know about emotional intelligence, I am just emotional.". She truly believes that humanity is based upon emotions, shared feelings, and an intangible commonness of affect that may lead to mutual interest and negotiated intents. For my part, if I have to make this point clear once again, I believe that a humane relationship foundations lie in convergent intents backed up by common interests, leading to emotional entanglement. So, I am supposed to be the cold fish to her fiery bird, or something when I see it as two sides of the same coin. Truth to tell, following our respective ways do not seem to have brought us what we expected, and trying to go the other way around has left her disappointed and me in a very appropriate pickle.
So, how am I feeling about The Pickle? Good question. I feel attracted to her, to say the least, even if I cannot say why, which is also part of the pickle. But as I am not one to go clubbing baby seals just for fun and given her current predicament, I do not wish to take advantage of her situation: I would be disappointing myself, not to mention that it would very probably fire back at me anyway, so I am hardly keeping her at safe distance. Or so I believe or try to make myself believe. I just cannot escape the feeling that we are wasting a great opportunity. Then again, the current state of affair is better than having met like trains in the night.
Anyway, it was a very enjoyable evening. Once more ;-)

Understanding Coco

La psychologie vectorielle est un champ de recherche vaste, à peine exploré. Il nous appelle comme toutes les figures de l’Infini.
Comment l’aborder ?
Faut-il parler du premier jour, de la création ? Probablement pas.
Science pratique par essence, la psychologie vectorielle est loin des paradoxes fondateurs. Œuf et poule ne l’intéressent que dans la mesure ou l’un se mange et l’autre peut être utilisé comme projectile.
Ce moment si délicat du commencement, cette heure si particulère où l’on cherche à définir les bases sur lesquelles on s’appuiera, ce momentum entamé en un point du néant n’a, pour nous, pas lieu d’être.
S’imaginer un tableau blanc, le champ d’expérience, est amplement suffisant. On exclut l’orgueil conceptuel d’une création ex-nihilo, la gageure des attaques académiques à l’encontre des prédécesseurs. Seule existe la perception immédiate du réel. Pas de symboles. L’empirisme est réhabilité dans son immédiateté brutale.
Les mathématiques se subtituent aux constructions élaborées. La figure emblématique du vecteur est la seule concession à l’appareil conceptuel. Les mouvements de l’esprit deviennent accessibles. Le brouillard du jargon, dissipé.
Toute expérience humaine peut être le point de départ de la psychologie vectorielle, car la psychologie vectorielle investit la totalité du champ du vécu, fait apparaître nettement son intelligibilité filigranée.
On en prendra pour exemple Coco.
Soit les points A, B, C, D et E.
Au moment 0 : A est en conversation avec B, C est en conversation avec D, E (« Coco ») est sous la table de C et D.
Au moment 1 : E (« Coco ») quitte la table de C et D, renifle le sac de A. C suit E (« Coco »), le rappelle, et en profite pour offrir une perche à A. B et D font semblant d’ignorer ce qui se passe.
Au moment 2 : A ne saisit pas la perche de C. C quitte le champ, suivie de D, et de E (« Coco »). B ricane.
Hypothèses de travail :
1) Inertie de A
2) Manque d’arguments convaincants de C.
3) Mouvement de C vers A contrecarré par la présence de B, D ou E (« Coco »).
Conclusion : La psychologie vectorielle améliore l’intelligibilité du réel. Il est démontré que toute situation peut être résumée à des interactions simples entre des acteurs, et étudiée de l’extérieur, sans que l’observateur ait à subir les interférences perturbantes d’un appareil conceptuel lourd.
La psychologie vectorielle est résolument moderne, en ce qu’elle s’inscrit dans la lignée des sciences qui prennent en compte les conditions d’expérimentation pour mettre en contexte leurs observations. Dans un prochain article, nous étudierons ces convergences.

Coco

Critical: never have both a cocker and a daughter named Constance.

The side-kick intro

Between the time when the oceans drank Flanders,
and the rise of the sons of Toffler,
there was an age undreamed of.
And unto this, Maj. Hindsight,
destined to wear the jeweled crown of Vectorial Psychology upon a troubled brow.
It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga.
Let me tell you of the days of high adventure...

--Archimago

An evening with Miss S.

Last evening, I was supposed to finish a paper, then guess who came by.

Miss S. and I are going back a long way, in more than one way, so to speak. We meet once in blue moon, and keep loosely in touch ; it usually goes like "Ping, hello, still alive?", followed by "Pong, elho too.". These days we usually keep it at that once or twice a year except for the even rarer email detailing some issue, in the hope that the other may have some kind of advice or help to offer. We have an open door policy, but none of us has taken advantage of it for years. Since last March that is, when I found myself crashing at her door at 0500, sailing three sails to the wind, and still "smelling of another you obviously cannot remember", as she so elegantly (and indulgently) put it. This brilliant situation having arisen from my ongoing pickle with someone else. Anyway, it is complicated. The point is that I would have met her gladly, and, given the current inglorious situation, I just had to.I am still unsure of what her purpose might have been, perhaps was it simple kindness, checking up on me, payback, revenge, or just that she had to make a point, I honestly do not know. Or perhaps I do. Anyway, what she said strangely echoed and expanded on what my current beloved pickle told me earlier that day.
Here are a few pieces of what went flying to my face:

• "You and I are more interested in what is being done than in who is doing it. This is why we went along so well and drifted apart so easily."

• "We are more interested in caring instead of being cared of. In fact, I resent being cared of, it makes me feel dependant and victimized. It makes you feel worthless. I wonder which is best actually."

• "People like us do not communicate instinctively about fundamentals. You just assume too much, no wonder the impression you end up leaving is of someone insensitive, arrogant and demanding. Well, you certainly do the cold part quite well."

Or perhaps was it just to say that she has recently found her own pickle? I guess I wasn't that helpful then, but as she said: "You do not grow by asking your mirror image, but it helps seeing what may be off. If you can see it;-)".

Anyway, it has been a nice evening. And while it doesn't help you to know that someone is facing the same issues as you, it is, in a way, reassuring.
There is still hope in Aspergerland, after all ;-)

The French Touch V

The French Touch IV

"Ici chacun sait ce qu'il veut, ce qu'il fait quand il passe."

expectations

Having to reluctantly meet someone else's expectations is usually accomplished minimally. Pursuing this course only leads to greater frustration. Go beyond these expectations and find the freedom to have yours.

frustration

Never try convincing yourself that you are not feeling and needing

something again if you do not want to wake up at 0400 feeling like you have been betraying yourself for months.
After all, you can only learn from what you did, not from what may have been, even if by trying you are risking to find why what you will cannot be (and even if your previous attempt has been far less than successful;-).
As you already said, it is time to move on, but not in a way that denies and deceives yourself and others.

The French Touch III

New new Mini's best thing ;-)

The French Touch II

They call it a park, I call it a cage.
Makes for some interesting misunderstandings ;-)

Imposter Syndrome

"While you're saving your face, you're losing your ass."

The great modern thinker who said that once described himself as such:

"You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy."

He also said, in no particular order:

• "You aren't learning anything when you're talking."
• "The noblest search is the search for excellence."
• "Doing what's right isn't the problem. It is knowing what's right."
• "Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath."
• "I want to make a policy statement. I am unabashedly in favor of women."
• "I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. First, let her think she's having her own way. And second, let her have it."

As well as

• "There are plenty of recommendations on how to get out of trouble cheaply and fast. Most of them come down to this: Deny your responsibility."
• "We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood."

So, who will you cast your vote to in the upcoming European elections?