Tag Archives: life

Blue is for Boys

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…and a man asked, “Why are girl geeks so rare?”

…and all the women in IT and other geek fields raised their heads just far enough to roll their eyes, give the ‘for real?’ look, blink, sigh, giggle, give the evil eye, laugh, rant about feminism, turn it into a ‘your mom’ joke (“…because we were all too busy with your mom for her to have a daughter after giving birth to you”), etc.

A similar question could be asked about a LOT of things if you just missed the fact that all kinds of sexism is still out there.

Some of the hottest topics in the U.S. right now are womens’ rights over their own bodies and whether people who don’t want to have and guy-girl marriage have a right to do so. Some of the hottest topics in the world are whether or not women have the right to even make their own decisions and live if they try to.

It is always surprising, yet not surprising, that people miss what gender identities other than strait male, go through. They want to know why they don’t see it, and my easiest answer is that it isn’t happening to you or you’re so conditioned to accept it, that it is no longer an issue.

Women accept that they are no good with technology, or cars, or sports, or other ‘guy things’ from a young age. And then there are people like me that you wonder if we’re into it just because it was implied that we weren’t supposed to be.

Not all sexism really bothers me. It’s not worth my life, my energy, being negative to get worked up about even little thing. Some people do that, and in doing so miss the real stuff. They are too busy concentrating on the small symptoms rather than the real disease. I’m not talking about a ‘your mom’ joke or ‘that’s what she said’, though those sorts of things exist instead of ‘your dad’ or ‘that’s what he said’ and one wonders why even if just a little.

Just like homosexuals are more concerned with having equal rights, getting and keeping jobs, and feeling safe than whether or not they say ‘gay’ in a certain way at purepwnge.com, I am not going to care if you hold the door for me or not.

I’m talking about the sorts of things that allow the initial question to be asked. How does it happen that women have an extreme less of a chance to have certain careers, that are well within their abilities, in their future?

I could fill this post with stories of my own experiences. Explain I’ve seen sexism and sexism be enabled by guys and gals alike. Yes, many women help sexism along plenty. But I think really what I am trying to say is…

Really? You don’t know that sexism is alive and well?

If that’s the case, open your eyes a bit wider, read a little, listen a little harder. Even if it is not happening to you, you should be able to see it and empathize and even help stop it in some small way.

Since you’ve asked the question, I guess you’ve decided for some reason to care. Asking this question has likely lead you to see it (or marked your really seeing it for the first time). You don’t need to look far to get some whys.

However, there is no real satisfactory answer to why are world is filled with prejudice. Why don’t people don’t treat people as just people? I don’t know.

Why do we have to arbitrarily label, categorize, and judge each other as being inferior?

I don’t know. I wish we’d stop, or at least try. I think that’s where I get mad and pick my battles is when people don’t even care enough to give a sincere effort to be more sensitive to what fills someones shoes. Take a moment to think about what it takes to walk their mile, especially since we have the power to make that easier for everyone with so little effort.

And with that, I will vacate my soapbox for the time being.

To change gears into something more silly while maybe getting a glimpse of walking even a tiny bit in a woman’s shoes, check out this Smartest Man in the World podcast. It’s one of my favorites. That Rory is one funny guy. :)

Blog Flakes and Compulsive Editing

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So, my blog’s birthday came and went not too long ago. I didn’t mark its passing because I’ve been a flake about writing, which I’m sure makes orphan kittens cry.

If I believed in New Years resolutions, posting more on the blog again would be a good one. I know this is an issue a lot of writers in general struggle with. There are many tricks of the trade to deal with it. Blogging itself is really a trick to get you to write more. So, what’s trick to make you blog? Where will this trickiness all end?

The tricks to get oneself to wake up in the morning, the tricks to make oneself exercise, the tricks to get oneself out the door on time, conserve gas, eat right, get more done at work, stay organized, stay in touch with people, stay working on art…

I have several drafts of posts in my little WordPress CMS thingie. Keeping drafts might be the key to this. I don’t usually have enough time to write a post from beginning to end or edit to where I’m happy. Often I’m not even sure if it’s a post that ‘works’ for me. Being a draft takes the pressure off a bit. It allows random things so when you sit down to post, really all you have to do is sit down to edit something. That’s certainly not something I always feel like jumping up and doing, and sometimes I want to edit a piece of writing 6,000 times before putting it out there.


Compulsive editing is a big issue I have with longer story writing. I tend to want to reread what I’ve written so far before I go on to write more. If I reread I want to edit. This leads to me spending that time reserved for writing doing edits instead.

To work out compulsive editing I’ve been trying to write before rereads. If it doesn’t fit exactly right because I didn’t remember all of the details of the story so far, or what I decided to name a few characters, that can be worked out during editing time. We’re trying to make writing time for writing. What a concept.


It’s easier to write for me right now since I’m on vacation and doubly since I’m traveling. Many of my distractions are at home and in its place are inspirations as I’m exposed to what I don’t normally see every day. I think people tend to block things out as they get used to them. Most of our life then becomes routine, and thus blocked out. How does one maintain wonder and inspiration as their days are a series of blocks one doesn’t remember independently or distinguish from one another? Sometimes when a week of work goes by, and I try to remember the individual days and what happened, I come up pretty scarce.

It’s important to break your routine as uncomfortable as it is. Life churns and bubbles much more brilliantly even if the resulting boiling chaos can throw us off kilter.

So I’ll do my best to throw the kilter off and battle blog flakes, and let me know if any of you out there have the secret key to this business. I’d be interested to hear how other people deal with these things.

At Fall’s End

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I take chances mostly to make sure that I experience life while I can. Carpe diem is a cliche, but routine is a well accepted one I try to cast off from time to time. I try to trust that things which are worth while will come from a night spent with something new or a day driving to a different destination.

I’m not saying I don’t like where I am. I’m not saying I don’t want to move forward either. Right now I’m all for little tweaks and changes after thinking and examination, but I’m not ready for a world turned on its side.

I guess I’m ready for nothing, in both senses. No one is ready for anything really and neither am I. I am also more than ready for nothing earth shattering to happen for awhile. It’s been nice not riding swells and feeling sick, going up and down, constantly having feet slipping out from under you, being lost at sea.

I may be a pirate at heart, but for now I want to sit on my island and drink some rum. Yar.

Maybe I want to be ready for more, but wanting doesn’t make it so. Before I dive in head first, let me stare and try to see through the muddy waters for signs of danger a bit longer before taking a plunge.

I exist, try not to make mountains, but even the mole hills are dangerous. I’ll try not to trip and I’ll see you next fall…

Self Improvement’s Guise

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If you’ve been reading this blog, chances are that you know I’m all about self improvement. I’d like to take a moment to make what I think is an important distinction, which I don’t think is always clear.

By being an advocate of self-improvement, I’m not saying that the Celes of yesterday was so flawed that a new me is needed. There seems to be the theme among people who are into self improvement that you need to hate yourself to want to be better. I don’t think improvement works well this way, nor do I think that improvement is about being better each day, every day.

I try to improve myself and my life, but I do so with knowing I will never reach level 1000. Life if not like some games where you’re gaining all these experience points and leveling up and leveling up until you’re at level 1000+ by the time I’m seventy-eight years old. As much as I wish it were, life just isn’t like that, my friends. Everyone whose self improvement is a linear picture of reaching perfection will be sadly disappointed in the end.

We as people, and life itself, go in cycles. You can’t always be happy or healthy. The best you can do is try to extend the times you are and minimize the times you aren’t. If anything, learning to deal with the times when things are bad in the best way possible is self improvement. To try to reach a state where you never trip, never falter, and never stray from the best of the best is not only an impossible goal, it’s a step backwards. To improve you first have to realize that you’re not horrible the way you are now, you’re never going to suddenly morph into that butterfly or swan or whatever, and you’re going to make terrible mistakes and have horrible things happen to you on your journey.

You are you, with your own faults and particular qualities. To pledge to make slight changes is one thing, but to act like some day a Honda Civic is going to become a Hummer is delusional and sad (about as sad as that metaphor).

Today is as important as tomorrow, and as much as you should be working towards something, you need to realize, accept, and live in the moment of who you are today as well. Do it because there may not be tomorrow. Do it because to really improve you have to love and accept who you are now. Do it because tomorrow, whether or not you like it, you will still be you no matter what you tell yourself. Do it because even if right now sucks, it is part of you and your story, and only you can do something with it that makes it worth having happened.

I know some things about myself, others I’m sure I’m still learning. By knowing I am a certain way, I can embrace and express that in ways that I am increasingly more comfortable with. Faults are not always faults, and finer qualities not always so fine. To focus on ‘changing the bad things about yourself’ is to place a black and white value on a part of who you are and either try to cut it out or replace it like some kind of Frankenstein graft. To see both sides to a coin is to admit the world is flat on only has two sides. Consider the many sides to the tetrahedron, or other polyhedrons that are the building blocks of life, and try to find how each piece can fit together.

I try to be realistic. Combine slight tweaks with strategies and meet yourself somewhere in the middle before you fall off the edge. If you hate who you are now and set an impossible goal for tomorrow, you will fail in the worst way. Don’t kid yourself into thinking you’re not who you were, because you will always be some version of yourself. Accept it as everything you were has made you today, and will make you every day after until the end of this life. All things shape us, the best we can do is try to take some control over how they do and accept the things we cannot so we can move past them.

Acceptance is the biggest piece to the puzzle I think most people miss. You have to accept yourself, your life, and the general way of life, that it is not a perfect pearl or even an oyster, before you can move on.

And move on to what? What do you really want? Figuring is as much part of the journey and figuring out how to get it.

I want to be better than yesterday may seem like a the daily goal to strive for, but in the long term it makes little sense as it is a generalization, a judgment on the unquantifiable, and an impossibility.

More than self improvement, I think of this as learning to live by living. This involves thinking and introspection as much as it involves getting out there, taking chances, and doing.

Whole Myth

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I’m still learning what owning a vehicle in the state of MA means since I haven’t even had it for a a year yet. I got the truck last September and it’s about the time where you get another insurance quote I guess. I asked my dad about what I need to do when September rolls around (things with stickers and whatever) and he asked me how long I’ve had the truck.

“Two years?”

“No, a year in September.”

I was about to write it off as a “You’re getting old, Dad.” moment when it occurred to me that a lot has happened since September, when I got the truck, and the end of November when I returned to Massachusetts from Virgina. I’m not sure how much more my life could have turned around.

And it’s not done turning, even now things are spinning. There is control in this rotation, but a constant honing is happening as I try to round out my life in all its ways.

My recent undertaking is completely cliche- more so than the career switch job search thing. I’m working in an office I drive to and I need to find a way to stay healthy.

For the company meeting we went to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. This was a couple weekends ago and a ton of fun. While there me and my guest took on a portion of the Appalachian trail. We didn’t have hiking shoes, never mind any other gear, but why not? We’re young and able.

That’s how I know I’ve moved from the category of young and able to young and out of shape.

Just last summer I had calves of steel. I walked probably about ten to twenty miles a day for my job and then I had no car to boot. My body and I were friends, even if I wore a less than flattering L. L. Bean polo to make it so.

Now I spend so much time using mental and social skills, and becoming tired doing so, that I forget about the rest of me. I’ve very satisfied with the challenges and the days go by fast, but where is the time and motivation when that ends to excise the rest of me?

I recently purchased a Wii and have a Wii Fit to boot. I figure if I can trick myself into thinking it’s a video game, I’ll exercise. Truth be told, it is working, but I’m starting to think it’s not enough. It can’t replace all of those miles I used to walk by a long shot.

So now I have to figure something out. I could take up some fun outdoor activities I love. It’d be nice to play paint ball again. Most of the things I can come up with are group activities which I don’t have a group for. Adding a social aspect to it makes it even less appealing. Remember my attempts to start roleplaying again? I just wanted to roleplay, but people got in the way. I don’t want to leave this in the hands of other people, so that kind of rules out sports and other group exercise. I’m kind of back to square one with virtual fitness.

I’m sure I’ll figure this all out. As each part of my life falls into place, things have an adjustment period. Once they become easier, then you can add on something else to make your life more fulfilling until one day maybe things feel whole. I wonder and suppose that feeling completely whole might just be a myth. But they say it’s about the journey. It doesn’t stop me from pursuing and striving. And I’m happy, proud, and much more satisfied than I have been in a long time as a result.

Stranger than Fiction

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This morning, on my way to do ‘the mail run’ before work, I almost hit a bird in the road. The thing that was odd about this was not that it was an animal in the wrong place at the wrong time, or that it was me in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The weird thing was the location: East Hartford Ave. Uxbridge, MA

Matched with the type of bird: peacock.

I knew it was the beginning to another odd day. I knew this not because I am a reader of omens and portents. I knew this because life has become an interesting and unexpected thing.

By now I should expect the unexpected. I have a job where just when you think there is some sort of routine, something new and different that you’ve never seen comes across your plate and stares at you with beady little eyes. Add this to the rest of my life. I have weird, vivid, often horrifying dreams. Coincidences and dejavu are constant. Is it more strange to feel like whats happening has happened before, or that both Ezra and I met after not seeing each other since February (and years before that meeting) both wearing Metallica shirts and admitting we weren’t ‘really big Metallica fans or anything’.

I wonder about writing fiction sometimes and the length people go to make it seem realistic. With the odd occurrences that happen on a day to day it occurs to me that we wouldn’t know what realism was anyways. Reality often feels surreal, and truth really is stranger than fiction.

Last night I dreamt about telling someone at work that I just had a dream about them, since in the dream I dreamt having that dream.

I also dreamt I was a super-long pole arm bearer for some feudal post-apocalyptic oriental army. I was captured by the enemy feudal lord when he tricked me into thinking I was close to defeating him. It was simply a ruse to get me away from the rest of the army and capture me. When I tried to escape, no matter how far and fast I went, there was a large-as-a-house warrior waiting to bring me back to my prison. There was nothing to do at this prison but sleep and play strange card games I was bad at.

I can only spend so much time on the epic stores my subconscious undertakes. Life is constantly weaving a strange tale of its own. Instead, I spend my time dodging peacocks.