Bartender Geek

So, at Arisia, I saw a bunch of people who didn't recognize me. I waved at them, and they looked kind of blankly at me.

I'm not offended or anything: it's a result of the face that I have.

I have an average, normal face. And I like it.

My face shape is a pretty standard slightly-squared-off oval, the kind that you'd draw if you were drawing a (male) face, but not of anyone in particular. My nose has no notable characteristics about it. It sticks out about as far as average, is about as large as you'd expect a nose to be. I have the expected number of eyes -- two -- of standard size and shape, set about as far apart as is common. My eyebrows are eyebrow-shaped, my mouth is mouth-shaped, my chin is chin-shaped.

I have the haircut that my barber gives when you order a "Men's Regular". Along with a neatly-trimmed full beard of exactly the length and style that my barber trims it to when you buy the "Haircut and Beard Trim" combo. And my barber is a good, skilled, traditional barber from a traditional barber shop, whose "Men's Regular" and "Beard Trim" are exactly as neat and tidy as a good, skilled barber would traditionally make them.

I have male-pattern baldness that is following the male pattern. My eyeglasses are what you'd think of if you thought of the word "eyeglasses" without any adjectives.

I am short, so I'm hard to see in crowds, but that is mainly because of my shorter-than-average legs -- my torso is normal length, so, if you look at me, I don't look short. I'm fat, but not unusually so -- just enough that people's hind-brain sees me as "not any sort of particular threat, or target".

I like this about me. It's not without its downsides, but, on the whole, I like it.

If you know me well, you recognize me. But anyone else?

If you've met me a couple times, you'll have a hard time putting me in context -- my face doesn't have any specific trait that you can use as a handle to "index" it in your brain, but you'll feel that I'm familiar. If you've only met me once, you'll have a vague feeling that I'm familiar, but not know why.

And if you've never seen me before in your life, you'll STILL feel that I'm someone you vaguely know somehow.

And that makes me more approachable than most people. I feel familiar, friendly, even to complete strangers.

That's worth it to me.

I dreamed that someone was asking me trivia questions about languages, and the question was how you say "please" in German.

And I totally couldn't remember. I went through por favor, permisso (which may actually be "excuse me"), si vous plait. And I couldn't remember. So I turned to Lis and said, "I'm remembering various Romance language things, but not Germanic ones. Can you think of any English words of Anglo-Saxon origin that have a meaning similar to 'please' that might give a clue?"

Lis came up with "beg". I started rolling that around in my mind, with typical sound changes. "Beg" to "bed" to "bet" to "bit", to Bitte.

I have no idea if my brain actually worked something out, or if it's just a coincidence.

Anyway, when I woke up, that dream reminded me of something ELSE that I have been rolling around in my mind occasionally.

One day, I just started thinking about the words "retrospect" and "hindsight". Those two words are synonyms, and they are both compound words, made from two roots, one might "sight" and one meaning "backward." It's just that in one word, both roots are Latinate, and in the other, they're both Germanic.

And so, since then, I've been occasionally trying to think of other pairs of words that have that same relationship: words made from more than one root, in which, in one word, all the roots are Latinate (or Greek, I guess -- let's open the game up further), and in the other word, they're all Germanic/Anglo-Saxon/Old English. and in which the two words are synonyms. I haven't really come up with any good ones besides that first pair that inspired the thought.

It's true. When I want something, it is usually an intellectual want, or a mild, vague urge, but I rarely truly passionately desire something.

I'd like to claim that this is because of a careful Buddhist detachment, or training in Stoic philosophy, but, in reality, it's probably just a side effect of the type of depression I've had for years.

So it's kind of neat that I now really, really want something -- something I desire so much that my teeth hurt.

That's not a figure of speech, by the way -- I literally noticed that my back molars were somehow aching with desire for this. Dunno why that happens, but it did.

Bruce Galloway's Fantasy Wargaming generally considered to be a truly awful roleplaying system, and I don't disagree with this assessment. I attempted to play it once, in seventh grade, and couldn't make heads or tails of it -- and I later discovered that this was due to no fault in myself, but simply because it is just that poorly written and thought-out.

So I don't know why I desire the thing so much -- but I found a copy on AbeBooks, for $3.98 including shipping, and bought it. Other copies started at $1, but generally had shipping start at $3 -- there was one that was listed for $1 with $2.50 shipping, but it was listed as "Fair" condition, while the $3.98 with free shipping was listed as "Very Good" condition, so I decided to spend the extra 48 cents.

I don't suppose that the seller is going to make a great profit on this thing, but it gets it out of his or her stock anyway.

Yeah. I just spent nearly four bucks on a used copy of a game that everyone, including me, thinks sucks. And I can't wait for it to get here!!!

So, I was just thinking about my own emotional and mental health.

Seems to me that one's psychic health (using "psychic" to mean "emotional and mental", not, y'know "ESP-like") is partially genetic and partially from experience -- that is, it's both nature and nurture.

A bunch of my friends are psychically less healthy than they ought to be, because of incompetent parenting, or because of traumatic social experiences growing up. A bunch of my friends have had reasonably-decent childhoods, but are genetically predisposed to poor psychic health.

Now, I'm not THAT great mentally and emotionally -- but I think I'm better than my genetics would indicate. I have my problems, biochemical in nature, but I am more stable and able to form trustworthy friendships than I'd expect, given my biology.

So, that suggests to me that my parents did something right. And I've been trying to think about what lessons I learned from them that have led to me being as sane as I am.

One of the big ones, I think, was that my mother, whenever she yelled at me or punished me for doing something wrong, would ALSO explain that, "Just because I'm mad at you doesn't mean I don't still love you." So, for me, "conflict" =/= "abandonment".

We were going over to visit a friend, Ben (vonbeck) and I, and Ben was driving. As we were driving over, we were talking about upgrading the main machine gun in his car, by replacing the projectiles with ones with lifting bodies, to give them longer range. They already had guidance fins, so they were extremely accurate at long-range, since they were steerable. But we weren't sure what the lifting body shape would do to armor penetration, so we were considering using discarding sabot penetrators in them.

Anyway, Ben didn't like driving on the roads, so he drove off the side of the elevated highway, plunged ten or twenty stories onto the roof of another building, drove off the building to a lower elevated highway, plunging another five stories, then drove off the edge of THAT highway to a ground level road which was just next to the home we were going to. I told Ben, "This is why your suspension is always shot." But we did save a lot of time.

Anyway, Scooby-Doo and Velma had gotten there before us, and Velma was telling Scooby that he had to break it off with Shaggy's girlfriend. But Scooby argued that Shaggy was totally ignoring her, because he was stoned all the time, and probably didn't even REMEMBER that he had a girlfriend -- certainly, that's how SHE felt about it. Velma said that he had to come clean, because Daphne and Fred were starting to get suspicious that SOMETHING was weird, and it would be better for Scooby to tell Shaggy what was going on, than for Shaggy to hear about it from someone else.

shanex was there, too.

And soon, deyo and mactavish showed up, and Ben showed off the shortcut that he'd taken, what with the driving off the side of the highways, that allowed us to get here before they did. mactavish didn't want to get sucked into the argument between Scooby and Velma, so she went inside to fix the washing machine that was broken. Unfortunately, although her General Repair skill was perfectly high enough to do this, she didn't have enough points of material to effect the repair. (Your Repair Kit can fix a certain number of hit points of damage, and, once it's used up, it's used up.) She thought, though, that in order to get the washing machine working, she didn't need to fix all the damage, and that really, if she fixed even two or five hit points, it would probably start running.

Now, since you can also loot Spare Parts from broken machinery, and Spare Parts are worth a certain number of Repair Points, just like Repair Kits, we looked around for broken machinery. So we decided to loot the washing machine for Spare Parts, which we'd then use to repair the washing machine, but it didn't work like that -- once you looted a machine, it changed from a Broken [whatever it is] to Junk, which is unrepairable, so that wouldn't work.

We looked around for other things that we could break and then loot, and we ended up smashing a tape measure, which we then looted for Spare Parts worth, like, about two Repair points, which mactavish used on the washing machine, but it wasn't enough to get the machine working, so we figured we'd have to go out and attack bandits and loot their cars and mecha for spare parts to fix the washing machine, which, frankly, is what we probably should have done in the first place.

Since it was just against bandits, I figured I didn't need to take direct control of the battle, and just sent my lance (that is what we call our team) out to fight the battle without me, which should have worked, but Juanita had turned into a lycanthrope and started attacking our side. We managed to win the battle, but we not only lost Juanita, but, like, two other lance members. Which shouldn't have happened -- really, we shouldn't have even taken a single hit. So I went back to the last save point, and, this time, I answered the door when the door-to-door saleslady came around, and when she tried to bite me, I was able to defeat the were-saleslady, although I eventually had to use my vampire powers to do it. THAT time, the battle went perfectly -- just a couple shots at the bandits' cars, and our lance won, and we managed to loot the cars for Spare Parts worth something like 45 Repair Points each, with which mactavish was easily able to repair the washing machine.

We are going to Italy this summer. We should have bought our plane tickets already; we haven't. Lis wants me to take on some more responsibility for this stuff, as I'm the person who's home during the day and generally have more free time than she does.

I don't want to.

Because I hate travel.

So, Lis asked me just now if I'd go through the Rick Steve's Guide to Rome, just to look at things that I'd find fun and want to do.

"Just so you know," I told her, "I'm now feeling nervous and scared."

"Why?"

"It's related to travel; I'm feeling fear and discomfort with the idea of even looking at the book for Rome."

"Hmm. How would you feel if I asked you to look through things for Western Mass, Lenox and the Berkshires and all that?"

"Um. . . let's see. . . bored and resentful, but not nervous and scared."

"I'm just trying to understand I work out the parameters.

"Yes, I understand that."

"How about New York City?"

"Also bored and resentful, but no fear yet."

"DC?"

"Now I'm starting to feel the nervousness."

"But when you WERE in DC, you enjoyed it."

"Yes, I know. Okay, I'm starting to feel scared and dizzy."

"Alright. Why don't you go sit down. Are you feeling too out-of-it to blog this?"

"No, I think I can do that."

"It might be a good idea to document this, just for future reference."

So I did.

Every once in a while, I dream that I'm playing in a LARP that is really awesome.

The problem is, because I wake up in the middle, I never find out what's actually happening.

The LARPS in my dream are usually what I call "WPI-style" -- one weekend long from Friday afternoon/night to Sunday afternoon, pre-generated characters, and, fundamentally, involving some sort of mystery as to what is ACTUALLY going on. When you show up, you only have a partial, and perhaps misleading, idea of what GENRE you're playing in.

In this game, players were put into teams, each team being, basically, a war-band. You were a group of companions who had been traveling and adventuring together for some time. And the setting was mythological.

My character was a Roman centurion, and my band included a big Gaulish or Norse barbarian, and some other people who I don't remember. Each of the rooms in the mansion/function hall/whatever which we were in was supposed to be an entirely different location.

I never found out what was really going on, but it seemed to be that someone was going around and trying to harm, distress, or kill mythological creatures who had formed romantic relationships with mortals. And our job was to stop that someone, since we actually LIKED the mythological creatures and their spouses (all NPCs) who we'd met.
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Last night, I dreamt that Neil Gaiman had just written a new novel, and one of the characters had four cats, and they were based on James Nicoll's cats. I think Hillary and one other one were lifted verbatim, and the other two were composites.

Also, happy birthday to Mr. Gaiman; he was the lede bit on Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac" for today.

So, matociquala posted about how she flunked Creative Writing twice, once in high school and once in college. And papersky mentioned that she also did badly in her Creative Writing classes.

I think they ought to track down their Creative Writing teachers, wave their collective awards and book contracts at he teachers, and gloat shamelessly, but they both have too much class for that. Well, papersky has too much class for that, anyway.

Anyway, I was thinking about MY creative writing classes in high school, and how badly they let me down. See, my classes were good. And I did well in them. And they taught me useful things.

Clearly, that's why I'm not a professional writer.

I'm really embarrassed that I can't remember my creative writing teacher's name right now -- I remember her face and her personality perfectly well, and her name will come to me some time after I hit post. Hell, I remember her lessons. And use them. She was really, really good, and loved what she did. I do remember my other favorite English teacher's name: Arthur Foisy, who, I just discovered upon going to my high school's website, is now a house dean.

The Creative Writing class was offered to seniors, and was split fifty-fifty between students who were honors-track and looking for an interesting elective-type class, and seniors who had flunked English at least once and needed to pass an extra English class to graduate. You needed to pass four years of English to get your diploma. Most folks did this by taking the normal four years of English, but, if you flunked one, or, for that matter, wanted to graduate in three years instead of four, you needed to double up. Your two main choices for doubling up were Creative Writing and Journalism.

This split helped both the CW and the Journalism classes immensely. Frankly, there weren't that many classes where honors/AP students and folks who flunked English WOULD learn together, and the dichotomy helped.

If I write essays competently, it's her fault. Hers and Mr. Foisy's, really.

Lucile Burt -- that's her name.

They both love literature and poetry -- reading it and creating it -- although Mr. Foisy preferred reading and criticism, and Ms. Burt preferred creating it.

But, see, they believed that EVERYONE could write and create, and probably should. And you didn't have to write and create for publication. I mean, you COULD publish, and that was fantastic if you did. But even if you never had any intention to publish anything, you'd still benefit from learning how to put a story, an essay, and a poem together, and from learning how to take them apart again.

I never had any intention to publish anything. Still don't.

Lis, for that matter, majored in Creative Writing in college, and did well at it. And earned an "A" in her high school class.

And, after college, she didn't write a word of fiction for ten years. Now she's started writing fanfic, but, again, she has no intention of going pro.

So, clearly -- if you want to be a successful professional author, you have to flunk Creative Writing.

I dreamed that it was Shavuot (which is actually in the late spring, not late summer/early fall), and Cherie and Everett (my rabbi growing up and her husband), and Mom and Dad were with Lis and me at Temple B'nai Brith for services. Mom, Everett, Cherie, and Phil (the darshan for TBB) were all leading different parts of the service.

Anyway, at one point, one of them was giving a sermon about the importance in Jewish thought of community vs. individualism. See, Shavuot commemorates the giving of the Torah on Mt Sinai, and how it was given to ALL the people as a group. And the sermon was about how, in Judaism, the community is the central thing, rather than the individual, as it is in American culture.

Then there was a disruption. 'Cause Sen. Lieberman was there for services, and he took this PERSONALLY. He thought that this was directly directed at him, and was saying that he was being selfish and self-centered by considering an independent run after losing his primary. Which was, in fact, a lesson that could reasonably be drawn from the sermon, but was NOT what the person giving the sermon had had in mind, since he or she (I can't remember if Phil or Cherie was giving the sermon, since, in real life, I've heard them both give lectures on this theme) had written the sermon long before the whole election thing, and, in any case, didn't particularly consider Joe any more, or less, than any other community member.

Anyway, Joe Lieberman was nearly in tears, and stormed out. My father followed him to talk to him and listen to how he was feeling, and they had a long talk. At the end of it, Lieberman had really started to examine his own motives, and was starting to think that, yeah, if he wanted to be the kind of person he wanted to be, he should support Ned Lamont. He was still unhappy and hurt, but Dad had really helped him out by listening to him.