The wonderful thing about the Internet is the ability to find people, quite easily, and be given the opportunity to reestablish contact after what might have been years of silence.

The horrible thing about the Internet, however, is the ability to find people, quite easily, and be given the opportunity to reestablish contact after what might have been years of silence.

I never know how to feel when people I knew from ages ago come up and throw me a “Hi, how’ve you been?”  My initial reaction is “what the fuck do you care, years after you slagged me off?”  Then I calm down and remember that life happens and the circumstances were rather unusual (as they tend to be for dropouts).  Sure, they could’ve picked up the phone, but what is there to talk about when you never shared anything but the daily experience?  With that gone, there’s nothing to talk about.  Give it a few years, and there’s bound to be something worthy of discussion.

But the awkwardness remains.  And I would much rather not be bothered by these people, just to avoid that awkwardness.

And now here I sit, looking up people from THE PAST on facebook, wishing I could get back in contact with them, but knowing I shouldn’t, considering just how damned awkward it would be after everything that has went down since last we spoke.  Awkward because they were his friends… and although I grew to genuinely like them in our brief meetings, regardless of who they were to whom, I don’t know if I was lucky enough to have that genuine liking returned.

But I miss them, and I regret not getting to know them better before.  And I regret the thought that I might never have that chance now, with all the bitterness that remains in THE END.  I hate the thought that his incessant whining and smack-talking and “I Can Do No Wrong” -isms may have blown whatever chance I had to still call them “friends”.  I hate to think that they might actually think that I’m the delusional one.

There’s no way I can just randomly say “hi, how’s life been?”

And so I sit here, their names and faces on-screen, wishing we’d all met in a different way… or maybe not at all.

And this little kid runs up and says “YOU HAVE GREEN HAIR”

I smile and say “yup”, which was a big mistake, because her two sisters proceeded to come over and talk my hind leg off for the next half hour.  Well, the one talked the most, in fucking spanglish, so I just kind of nodded and smiled when she rattled on about how my hair is a boy’s haircut, my pants are for boys, my shoes are for boys, and don’t I like being a girl? and do I have a Mom and do I have a Dad and do I have a boyfriend and what’s his name and does he have hair on his face and do you have a pool and and and and…

Kept trying the “it’s late, I need to go home” line (and all that accomplished was her telling me which ways NOT to go on my way home, because there’s “alligators and (spanish for spiders) and vampires”).  Which then drifted off into a one-sided conversation about dogs and cats.  And then, to top it all off, little miss spanglish belches some god-awful rankness riiiiiight in my face.

And the littlest one nicks my rubber duckie.  Now I have no duckie in my car

And strangely… when I DID finally escape… I just felt sort of lonely.  Got bummed about it for about two minutes before I realized that I should celebrate the lack of screaming hellians instead… and enjoyed a nice long drive home.  Just the smell of night, the haze and the lightning flashing ahead.  Uber Groovy.

Since those who replied to my LJ Poll with the answer of “no effing way chix0r” are spectacularly uber, and I would hate not having their input on things, I’ve decided to leave LJ comments open on these blog posts.  Ah well.  It was worth the shot.  Thanks for the input!

So yeah, in case you couldn’t gather from my Flickr feed, I have myself a car.  Nothing new.  In fact, it’s the same car I’ve been driving for years, but only because Mum was wonderful enough to share it with me for as long as I stayed under this roof, and all my activites were local.  With being a commuting student next semester, though, sharing would’ve been rather difficult.  So Mom bought herself a new 2008 Chevy Cobalt, and gave the ol’ Cavalier to me.
So that’s pretty damn nifty, if I may say so.  Now I just have to work on not wrecking it like the last hand-me-down Cavalier :P  Or, at least, wreck it with five gallons of something that smells better than milk.  *ribjab*  Then again, I’ve already wrecked this one once (Cockrell’s did a beautiful body job on it!), so maybe I’m safe.

Cleaning the damned thing was an all-day event.  Heh.

In other news, I think this might be year-two of being sick all summer.  At least I’m in brighter spirits this year… I just wish my guts would follow suit.

Therefore, I am IMPORTANT. I have a BLOG and EVERYTHING. I have screennames that are in no way related to my true identity, therefore I can BE AN ASSHOLE to EVERYONE. I can SCREAM at you from a distance, when I would never really do that in person. I can call you a coward, or an idiot, or a crazy-person with a false-sense of superiority, when in reality I’m just PROJECTING my problems on to YOU.  My banter is INTELLIGENT.  Anyone who disagrees is STUPID.  And you’re probably stupid because you’re CHRISTIAN, or maybe AMERICAN.  God help you if you’re BOTH, you sorry sack of crap.

People talk about the online community as if it’s the new reality, the better world, bridging gaps and connecting people all around the world, when in reality, it’s (in some ways) much worse than the reality we have.  And this really makes me all sorts of sick inside.  I hate how easy it is to get big-pants syndrome around here… and how compelled one feels to vehemently defend their entirely imaginary position in cyberlife.  This isn’t what it’s supposed to be, is it?  Or has my brain been entirely rotted by cyberculture idealism?  Because I used to believe in this place once.  I used to believe The Open Forum would be a beautiful idea, where we could meet and exchange ideas as mature people.  But all I generally see are immature fucktards with bad grammar, and the equally immature “educated idiots” flaming the hell out of them, laying waste to whatever claim to “intelligence” they may have had before.

God, I just want to punch you in the face sometimes.

…eh, see?  I guess I’m not much better.
Just a product of my (e)nvironment.

Sylver did indeed come over, and we pow-wowed on ideas on how to conduct the perfect handfasting.  Ideas in her head… I love them.  She’s always full of great ones.  So we chattered on that for about an hour and a half, where “ideas” would’ve turned into actual “planning”, which ain’t quite where we’re going just yet.  Just ideas and information.

So we spent the rest of the night doing energy work.  Sylver had the idea of working with vortices, so we grounded and drew up a basic energy vortex.  Dropped it, and started drawing elemental vortices, and we both found a very strange thing… our weakest elements were the easiest to draw, and our strongest elements were the hardest.  I can draw water and fire very easily, but when I drew a fire vortex, it was very, very hard to control.  Water didn’t want to come up at all… one side kept falling, so I had to strain to pull it up and keep it all level and cycling.  So it was very interesting, but very frustrating to have my “easiest” elements be such a bitch to control.  But rather cool that ones I have the hardest time connecting with were the easiest to work with.  I’d always been kind of skittish with air energy, and earth was next to impossible to tap… now that I know how to tap them, I feel much better about them.

There are more parts to the exercise that we didn’t even get to try… gonna have to keep working with those difficult vortices before we even dare attempt step-two or step-three.

Now that we have a newer level of work, I really need to finish writing up our first set of exercises.  I’ve had step-one of exercise-one written up for months now, but never started writing step-two, or exercise two.  Work work work.  I might have to consider putting those up here somewhere, once I get them finished.