Pensive

A SIMulated Life?

~ lobablanca

To the denizens who have threatened to send out an APB on Sammy and me if I don’t post soon…haha. Of course we made it home in one piece. Sammy is a wonder car. Not even I can change that truth.

The drive home was happily uneventful. Little spits and spurts of rain here and there, but nothing terrible. We arrived back in our neck of the woods to find that most of the snow had melted. I think this is the fastest I’ve ever seen snow of this magnitude disappear so quickly before. Usually, it would take a minimum of a month before we could see the ground again. Ah, that global warming myth…

So Sunday was the day of rest. And errands. And Sims3. I spent a mortifying 2 hours just designing one Sim character. It was around about that point that I realized there was something really off in my universe.

Don’t get me wrong. I love The Sims. I’ve been a huge fan of that game since it debuted almost a decade ago. I can’t even begin to calculate how many hours days I’ve sacrificed to my Sims addiction. Of course, such calculations would then require that I figure how much of my life I have given and continue to willingly give over to video games, be they PC games, PS2 games, or now XBox 360 games (friggin’ Aerosmith Guitar Hero and Mortal Kombat).

As much as I love video games, and as much as they make me feel like I’m still a kid when I’m playing them, the simple truth is, I’m not a kid anymore. Time continues to eke forward, no matter how little mind I pay it. And so I ended up having a bit of an existential freak out as I was trying to settle down and fall asleep last night. Instead, I began running through the list of things that I always thought I would accomplish in this life before shuffling off to whatever universal waiting room there is beyond this.

Truth is, I never really made any plans for leaving a large dent on this plane of existence. I suppose you could say I’m unassuming (or as unassuming as any one with Multiple Internet Personality Disorder can be). I did once have a dream though. Just one.

I wanted to write.

Words, as many of you have no doubt figured out, have always been my passion. I love the beauty of language. How words can be combined to form shear joy or utter despair. Swords of the sharpest edge can’t compare to words wielded by a skilled writer.

Writing is what brought me out of the shadows when I was in school. I was always satisfied with standing out of the spotlight, doing the work that needed to be done, making the grades that my parents would find acceptable. Doing all that I could not to make any waves that would draw attention toward me. But then our 6th grade English teacher introduced us to creative writing. And that was all I needed. I devoured each assignment she gave us with a passion that I don’t remember ever feeling for anything else in my scholastic career.

Even when that section of our coursework was over, I continued writing. Silly little stories, always about my friends, always about imagined adventures taking place at our school. I found those stories a while ago. Oh, were they awful. But at the time, they were like Pulitzer winners to me. After a while, I began branching out, leaving behind the comfort of my familiar friends, and began creating new friends and new places. And the themes grew darker and sometimes more frightening. What else would you expect from a horror fan?

The point, though, was that I was constantly writing. Constantly finding new places to set up residence for however long it took me to weave my latest tale. I spent a month with snow-stranded friends being hunted at a lodge in Vermont. Then I traveled down to a tiny Southern beach community, to spend month with new friends as they unraveled the story behind their mysterious new classmate. Then I was drafted into Starfleet. I spent quite a bit of time stationed on a Galaxy-class vessel, weaving, unraveling, and re-weaving stories there.

That was more than 10 years ago. And what have I done since then? I earned a degree in English, which I used to secure a job writing policy briefs, speeches, and whatever other linguistic minutia my federal agency clients require of me. I’ve heard my words uttered by well-known government officials. Each time that happened, a little spark within me fizzled into darkness.

Loba Disclaimer: I do still love my current job. It’s far different from those early days. Far more computer geeky, and far less gov-speak. But what happened to my dreams of writing? Not even dreams of becoming a famous author…you know, the kind who gets their name printed on their book covers in fonts sometimes triple the size of the actual book title. No, I never dared to dream that large. I just wanted to write.

Now I realize that I spend far more time living in other people’s worlds than I do in my own. Whether it’s The Sims or some other video game, or whether it’s my attempts to read 50 books in a year (which, by the way, I haven’t yet given up on). Always someone else’s worlds. No longer mine.

So take this as an early resolution if you must (although, dammit, I detest resolutions): I will get back to writing. Not only will I get back to writing, but I will complete something by the end of 2010. Hopefully, it won’t take me quite that long, but if it does, it does. I’m not going to let this die within me. I used to love to write. Hell, I still love to write. Why else would I keep coming back to this lair (besides all you lovely denizens, of course)? So time to return to my other worlds. Time to get reacquainted with all my other friends. True, some of them have been occasional traveling companions for some time now. It’s time to give them a more secure home.

Who knows? If I come up with something that doesn’t make my beta readers vomit, maybe I’ll even attempt to be published. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it…

Is That a Banana In Your Pocket…?

~ lobablanca

bananu

I haven’t been eating bananas every day like I usually do. That’s the excuse I’m using for what happened.

See, potassium deficiency apparently runs in my family. Lack of potassium has certain side effects, one of which is horrible muscle cramps in your legs.

Like the one that woke me up this morning at 5 a.m. Anyone who knows me well, knows that I can sleep through anything. Almost anything. Having my calf muscle twisted into an Auntie Anne pretzel shape apparently does not fall under the “Almost Anything” category. The pain is excruciating but quick, although the soreness lingers. I can still feel the remnants of that sweet agony in my every limping move today.

It’s days like this that burst my mental image of me still being on the edge of 17 (guess no white-winged doves will be singing for me today, eh, Stevie?).

So I went back to my banana pattern this morning. Want to know a secret though? I hate bananas. Unless they’re barely ripe…skin still a bit green. Firm flesh.

Sorry, I really don’t mean to sound vulgar in my description, but that’s how I like my bananas. If they’re too ripe (what most people would probably consider “normal”), I can’t stand them. I’ll get through maybe half a banana at that stage before I simply can’t go on.

I especially can’t stand listening to another person eat a banana. Nails on a chalkboard? Don’t bother me. The gooey, viscous shlup of someone masticating banana bites? Oh, the humanity! I have left conversations in which someone was eating a banana. It’s either that or trying to explain why I just shattered a molar in an effort to refrain from sucker-punching them.

Is that normal? Of course not. Am I normal? If you can’t already answer that question, you need to spend a little more time perusing the lair. I’ll wait…

…

Done? Good. I suppose I could just start taking potassium tablets. But I hate the thought of taking vitamins. Isn’t it better for you to get your vitamins and minerals from natural sources? I also know that there are lots of other foods out there that are as rich with potassium as bananas. Bananas are, however, the most convenient to eat on a daily basis.

Just as long as they’re young and firm…

[Yeah, I was being unnecessarily dirty just then.]

Comfort Clothing

~ lobablanca

Haven’t really been in a talkative type-ative mood as of late…although I did remember to set my Flashback Friday to publish. I was very proud of myself for that (not for knowing how to set it to publish, but for remembering to set it…I think all my time with the Captain is wrecking my memory, denizens).

[Okay, here’s a tangent for you: Why do all the alcohol Web sites make you plug in your birthdate before you can surf their site? I’m sure it’s for some ridiculous legal reason (doesn’t that sum up most legal reasons though?), but all it is is ridiculous.]

The weather has turned a bit maudlin this week, which leaves Loba feeling pensive and introspective. You know, unlike how I am most of the time. It also has left me craving comfort clothes. No, not “com-for-ta-ble” clothes. Comfort clothes. Like comfort food, only not edible. Although possible tasty.

[Tangent 2: The slow pronunciation of the word “comfortable” is the unspoken punchline of perhaps my favorite blonde joke ever. I’d be happy to tell it to you all next time we meet up at Central Perk for coffee.]

Right now, I’m wearing a comfort sweater. It’s chocolate brown and made of a material that feels like I skinned a Gund plush toy. Guess that’s why I call this my “teddy bear” sweater. I was so pleased with it when I first bought it that I went around to some coworkers and encouraged them to “pet my sweater.” Subsequently, I believe that I was the inspiration for a new “pet me” scenario in my company’s sexual harassment training.

In the evenings, I’ve been snuggling up in a gray and black Tasmanian Devil hooded shirt that I bought when I was a high school senior. It’s not a sweatshirt per se…just a long-sleeved cotton shirt to which the manufacturer added a hood. Thanks to my anal-retentive laundry skillz, it still looks pretty decent. The black has faded only minimally and the Taz logo is still intact, although it does look like it’s had the “craquelure” filter applied to it (w00t to my PhotoShop geeks on this one).

I love this shirt. It’s baggy, warm, and floppy…exactly what I want to change into after I work out and want “down time” clothes. Same with my red fleece pajama pants with the polar bears all over them. Warm, snuggly-soft, and cute to boot!

Comfort clothes, people. Comfort clothes.

Everyone’s got them. I know someone who has a pair of comfort sweatpants that are worn so thin you could watch television through the fabric (although why bother when you can just pick one of the myriad monster-truck-sized holes for your viewing pleasure?). Doesn’t matter, though. They’re comfort sweats. Anything to make the increasingly cold and dreary autumnal fade into winter a bit more tolerable.

So I’m snuggly-warm in my teddy bear sweater, counting down the hours until it’s Taz hoodie time. And, no, I don’t invite coworkers to pet me anymore. Denizens, however, are a different story…

A Grateful Nation

~ lobablanca

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we are meant to honor those who protect and defend our country, our freedoms, our rights. So it is on this day as it has been since before even my parents were glimmers in the eyes of their parents.

Last night, 14 hours before we were scheduled as a nation to observe this solemn moment, the Commonwealth of Virginia injected a lethal dose of chemicals into John Allen Muhammad, and a grateful nation ended the life of one of its soldiers who brought his conditioning to kill onto his home soil.

For those not aware, in 2002, John Allen Muhammad and his then 17-year-old accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo were known as the Beltway Snipers. They killed 10 people in the D.C. metropolitan area throughout the month of October. Further investigation determined that they killed numerous others during a cross-country trip that zig-zagged from Washington State to Arizona to Alabama to the D.C. area. Muhammad trained Malvo using the sniper skills he acquired from his military service, which included deployment during Operation Desert Storm.

Even after more than 7 years, I can still tap into a fear that I thought unfathomable before that October. The year prior, our entire country felt fear injected through our universal veins. But it was still a disconnected fear, even for those of us who work and live so close to the Pentagon, who have family and friends who worked there, or in the Twin Towers. Yes, it touched our lives. Yes, I knew people who lost loved ones in the attacks. But it touched me in the way that any such violence touches us: with distant whispers that, yes, such things happen…but not directly to me.

Muhammad and Malvo brought the whispers close to our ears, ominous threats breathed down our necks with icy intimacy. It was the frustrating randomness of it all that crippled us. People doing everyday tasks…pumping gas, vacuuming their cars, shopping for groceries, waiting for a bus. We took these tasks for granted until the day we realized that someone out there could at any moment end our very existence simply because we needed a gallon of milk or to top off our tank before we headed home.

Why?

What in Muhammad’s life brought him to these acts? Reports after the fact indicated that he showed signs of disturbance during his service time. But in war there is little time for coddling or concern. And then they are processed out at the end of their service…and then what?

We send these soldiers out into battle. We train them to kill and we ask of them the greatest sacrifice that any human is able to offer, that of their own life. And they do it, because it is their job. Their duty.

They come home and what then becomes of them? The suicide rate among soldiers is at an alarming high right now. We weren’t even sending those with physical wounds and scars to decent treatment centers for a while, so is it any surprise that those with internal scars should completely fall through the cracks?

Of course, all of this is speculation on my part. Maybe Muhammad was deeply damaged prior to his service. If true, though, it begs the question of how he was able to pass through the ranks undetected as insufficient for military duty, especially duty that would train him to be a sniper. Maybe his military time had nothing or little to do with his actions in 2002. Then again, life is not a series of perfectly separated incidents. Our lives are tapestries, woven together in complex, overlapping patterns. Tug one thread and a thousand begin to unravel. Even soldiers not yet deployed to combat zones can crumble under stresses unseen or unknown until it’s too late. The recent events at Fort Hood stand as proof of this.

Only when it is too late do we finally respond with a resounding call to “make them pay” for their crimes.

The United States has executed more than 1,000 people since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. We claim that states with the death penalty option see fewer crimes deemed punishable by death. Crimes still occur…just not ones bad enough to qualify for death. Some view this as justification for government-sanctioned murder. The system works!

Some will undoubtedly call me naive and a bleeding heart. They’ll accuse me of not understanding because I have never lost someone to the crimes of another. And that’s very true. I cannot say what that would do to me, how that would change my opinion. But I do not know for certain and, to be honest, I do not ever want to know.

So in my naivete I grapple with these questions. When is murder right? When we sanction it with yellow ribbon magnets on our cars and Veterans Day sales on camcorders and iPods? When we obfuscate it with words like “justice”? Will humanity ever reach a point in which we no longer feel entitled to kill each other for our differences, our prejudices, our possessions, our beliefs? Or are we simply too defined by genetic programming that trickles down through the millennia to the time we burbled up from the primordial ooze? Are we nothing more than animals who learned to make laws we will inevitably break? Or can we aspire to become more? Become better?

I don’t know. Maybe, though, that’s the best place to start.

The Psychology of Anthropomorphism

~ lobablanca

Anyone who knows me, knows Sammy. He’s my car. Yes, not only did I name my car, but I also gave him a gender. I even decided to go against the grain of “normalcy” in this instance and make him male rather than the traditional female gender, assigned most often to seafaring vessels but probably applicable across the transportation board.

I love Sammy. Not in the way that most people today love their cars, as extensions of massive yet vacuous egos. He’s not “tricked out” in any way other than floormats imprinted with my favorite cartoon canine and a radio I bought for him 8 years ago to replace the standard one that had no CD player. He’s got several dings and scratches in his paint job, and each one pains me…not because of any vanity on my part, but simply because he received them while under my care. I failed to take care of him in those instances, and now he wears the scars as reminders of my inability to be everywhere at once, much to my own personal chagrin.

Does all this sound a bit crazy? Of course it does. It’s He’s a car. But he’s a car I have owned for almost 9 years. Sammy has taken me thousands of miles in that time, but the “life distance” is measured in quite different terms. In terms of laughs, tears, confusion, heartbreak, giddiness, loss, anger…all carried within his sleek silver frame. It amazes me how much life takes place inside a car when you live in this area. They become our own little microcosm for hours at a time, conveying us and those we love to whatever destination we can reach on four wheels. I’ve conducted business and pleasure in that car, laughed and cried, sung unrepentantly off-key as miles ticked by on his odometer, sought solace in his silence when sound was just too much to bear.

Is it any wonder we ascribe human attributes to inanimate objects? Sammy is just as much a part of my life as any “real” person, has played just as important a role. This mesh of metal and mechanized motion has treated me very well, taken me places both wonderful and difficult, but has always protected me as we’ve gone along. More happiness is wrapped around him than I’d ever considered until today. And I considered all this while commuting home…in Sammy. He is my favorite location to get lost in the strangest thoughts.

Now I sit typing all this up on another inanimate object into which I have imbued a sense of anthropomorphic love: my home computer. This is the last computer that my uncle ever built for me. It was one of the last things we ever discussed on the last time I ever saw him. Every single time I turn this computer on, I think of him…of how much he loved building computers, how much he loved to talk about technology, to tell me about the latest new techie toy he had his eye on. I think of how he passed that love on to me. I think of how we would talk about things like how beautiful my latest computer case looked. I’ve had non-techie people laugh at me when I say something like that around them, but it’s true. My computer is beautiful, with its silver sheen, see-through side panel, and neon blue glow. It’s even more beautiful because my uncle built it specifically for me.

And now he’s gone while this beautiful silver machine keeps on running, because of him.

I don’t know why I’m so pensive about these things today. No, that’s not true. Yesterday would have been my grandmother’s birthday. What pains me most is that I forgot until this morning that yesterday was her birthday. It caused a bit of an existential shudder as I then began to panic that I would forget about her, about all the people I have loved and lost. Jumping to the worst case scenario is one of the exercises at which I completely excel, as I’m sure you can tell.

I know this won’t happen. I think about her all the time. I’ve gone out of my way, in fact, to surround myself with things that will serve as mnemonics for the wonderful memories of all these people whose paths I was lucky enough to share for such a short, bittersweet time.

I’m not really sure how to end this entry, so I’ll just slip away silently. Maybe I’ll go take a drive. I’m sure Sammy will be up for the adventure…