Path to Enlightened Insanity

Okay, so I’m starting a little early. Here is my NanoWrimo to do list:

1. Read what I’ve written, and organize by style. Then choose the top two styles.
2. Write down any and all story ideas.
3. Read non-fiction.
4. Write more random stuff. (PEIDM entries, short stories, etc.)

My goal is to have these done by August 31 so I can begin outlining and figuring out the structure of the story during September, which I’m going to use as national novel planning month. (Even if I have to be a nation of one. (Hey, it works for the Army!))

When I was walking down the stairs to get my biek before I went riding, I said to myself, “I’m going to write a PEIDM entry titled ‘Bike riding at sunset.'” Well that didnt’ quite happen, instead err… well, see above.

I was going to note that I’ve gotten in a recent habit of starting to bike ride about an hour before the sunsets, but I won’t mention that now. Nor will I mention that I really enjoy biking around Lunken Field. And its really not important that I’m an airplane buff and really enjoy watching airplanes.

So now that I’ve said nothing I guess I’ll stop here.

This might be a bit odd if you know my anti-established religion bent.

I really have trouble understanding people who completely deny an appreciation and awareness of a higher level of organization and obligation than our packaged societal systems. For most this is known as spirituality.

I had a wonderful day and a half at Hopedale Unitarian Universalist Community. It was an conference with a bunch of people my age. It was and is extremely healing for me.

Peace.

I’m not sure anyone understands my neuroses.

I’m not sure I understand my neuroses.

I’ve been wandering myself past “first works” err.. “first published works.” Wil Wheaton‘s books, Shane Caruth’s movie, Jenni’s novel. (okay Jenni’s novel goes in the former, not the latter for now.) So many of these things are a tour-de-force of determination and will.

The problem is I don’t want to get stuck where I’m at. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy most of my work in transportation but I know there is only so much variety in managing trucking transportation. I’m horrified that in five years I’ll still be in transportation. Sure, I could make some nice money, but for me, theatre is where its at.

Another part of the problem is I’m a peon. But, I like building systems. (ask for a tour of my website some day, that HTML that you get in your browser isn’t what is sitting on the disk on the webserver.) I’m annoyed that right now we’re building a bunch of important systems and I have nothing to do with any of them. (Remember this is about my neuroses.) I’m also willing to bet that at least one of these will be really screwed up upon actual delivery and will likely require debugging and more time on the phone debugging attempting to figure out why stuff doesn’t work.

I’m not being some self aggrandizing prick here, I more or less have just finished debugging a interface between two of the major systems at work. These two were set up to work together over two years ago, so yours truly, the co-op, who has worked for the company for six months has to take it upon himself to get the dang things working correctly and understand how the systems work and ferret out where things are failing. I feel comfortable in saying that just about two weeks ago we got them working reasonably well together.

I want more. I want to fix and develop systems. I believe theatre productions, excluding artistic considerations, are just large one off systems. One of those things about theatre is you can walk into a production about a week before it is ready to premier and pieces aren’t fitting and things are going to hell. You’ve got that week, and that week alone to get the whole system debugged and working together.

I’m not sure the people around me understand my theatre bug. Its been suggested to me that I find a community theatre and work on a production there. The problem is a matter of balance. I don’t want just to settle with theatre being an add on.

I need to develop a plan to get back to working in theatre, and somehow do it without having to mortgage my non-existant house.

Full Disclosure: This is an angry response to a diatribe a friend delivered to me on Friday the 13th. I was unable to turn this into a discussion, and I physically walked away from him, while he was in mid-sentence.

I will immediately concede the point that my friend made, then made again, then made yet another time, then made at least two more times, all without stopping for a breath. Most people continually make assumptions about any variety of situations. We assume the world will exist tomorrow, that public utilities will be operable, and that every phenomena is explainable if researched long enough. Making assumptions is a wholly necessary part of life.

That said, we also have assumptions in which we can choose to operate on. For instance we can choose to assume that our brakes will always work on our car and wait until the last feasible second to begin braking. Or (sticking with cars) we can assume that since we are the safest driver on the road, and as such will never get in an accident we should drop our auto insurance down to the legal minimum with the biggest deductible, have the bumpers, airbags, and seat belts removed from the car. (to sell as spare parts of course) But the fallacy in this logic is the assumption that most accidents result from our own unsafe driving. This assumption ignores the fact that not every accident can be prevented by our driving skills.

If you’re taking inventory in a warehouse you could assume that since a pallet of product should have 70 cases, every pallet has 70 cases. (This is a safe assumption for the most part. If I was inventorying say cases of pineapples, I’d be fine operating on this assumption. But, if I were inventorying cases of rolled quarters, I would want to count every case.)

The nuance of the situation is that when making an assumption we open ourselves to potential problems.

An excellent case and point is many of the security bugs in software. If you read any set of security notices for long enough you will most likely note a theme of “buffer overflows” and “malformed packets/flies/commands.” (Note: I just made an assumption regarding your cognitive and literary abilities, as well as the set of security notices you are reading.) Most of these errors are caused because the software in question expects data in a specific format and does not check to ensure the data is in that format. The security hole arises because the programmer made the assumption that the data would be in the proper format, and did not check to ensure that it was.

I’ll give one final example before I get to the specific situation that originated this entry.

Its actually quite common at work for people to share passwords with each other. People rely on a specialized assumption called trust in this case. (Someone breaking our trust, is simply the discovery that our assumption regarding the other person’s integrity is incorrect.,) This assumption can cause all sorts of problems – user ids/passwords act as a digital signature. I’ve not seen it happen yet but there are areas whereby giving someone your userid/password you can get yourself into bigger trouble.

Now to the original problem. I was presented with “the blue car problem” (i.e. How would you determine how many blue cars are registered in the country.) I chose to make the fewest assumptions and responded “Check the Department of Motor Vehicle records.” My friend responded that nobody ever had presented that answer to him, and responded with a volley of statistics that would have to be correlated to obtain an answer. I responded that that method makes too many assumptions (statistical variance is a measure of the potential inaccuracy in our assumptions.)

I stand by my original method; the best way to determine how many blue cars are in the country is to count them via DMV records.

I choose to make as few assumptions as possible.

When you make an assumption you open yourself up to the potential for unpleasant surprises.

I’ll close with an old assumption: Airplane hijackers want to negotiate with governments to obtain their goal. Therefore, a pilot should concede to their demands and get the airplane on the ground.

That assumption lost us several thousand lives.

I finished reading Wil Wheaton‘s book Just a Geek. One of the recurring themes of the book is parts of Wil struggling against other parts, trying to find a balance that fits. He also discusses at length his experience with auditions. (For the record I hated auditions when I was the director, far too much stress in being fair to the actor and getting the proper mix for the cast.)

But, reading about all of those auditions got me hankering again to do something in theatre. I have such an odd relationship with anything theatre. At one point in May 2002 or so I was literally within an hour of changing my major to anything but theatre, and I got a call from Horizon Theatre offering me an internship. Saved from quitting theatre once!

The next time went to quit theatre I not only quit it, but school (for a while) as well. This was preceded by a final production of an original script by another student in which the students I was directing mostly refused to learn their lines. I left the premier evening after the play I directed was performed butchered. I promptly decided at this point the appropriate thing to do was to find my way to the nearest restaurant bar order myself a three course meal and drink as much as possible. I added to my sense of failure by going to a restaurant I used to work at and ordering everything I wanted to eat exactly as the server needed to write it down/ring it in. I wanted out, and if I had to escape to the crappy days of serving tables I’d do it that way.

But anyone who has ever been bitten by the theatre bug knows its like drug resistant tuberculosis. You’ll get it and have a hard time getting rid of it, if you can get rid of it at all. So currently my theatre bug is flaming up. But more importantly I know I need to do something that engages me. Work fills my time and is challenging at times, but for the most part it is getting to the point of a well worn simulation game. For the most part I’ve figured out how to anticipate any problems, I’m still tinkering about, but I’m no longer trying to understand how the system works as a whole.

I’ve always thought I’d suck at touring theatre. What I love most about theatre and the other positions I’ve been in the opportunity to see how to get the mechanisms to run smoother an more efficiently. (Or as we call it in theatre, tech rehearsals) While when I was on a two month run at Horizon I significantly increased the efficiency how I did my job, you get to a point where there is a plateau and every additional ounce of efficiency is even harder and harder to obtain. With many endeavors, at this point the amount of time that adding efficiency takes to implement is outweighed by the actual time savings, outweighing any significant gains.

To top this all off I’m getting the singleitis bug. I’m at the point where my triangle of friends, too few to be a circle, in Cincinnati more or less bore me. I’ve had someone from my past sneak up on me, and while I enjoy chatting with him I don’t want to try to force him to be “the friend” who I spend all my time with.

I keep thinking about spending a day or two off from work, but I’m more and more convinced I’ll just use it sleeping, jacking-off, movie watching or some combination of the two.

So I’m stuck at what I should do… (although at the moment I’ll choose sleep.)

I’m actually a bit amazed at how pissed I am now. One of the cats took a swipe at the other, in the process injuring the other’s eye for long enough that cat with the injured eye nursed it for quite some time.

I “punished” the offender by immediately clipping his nails then (like my mother) forcing him to sit with me for longer than he’d like. When I was done with him I launched him into the bed. He jetted off into the kitchen or somewhere on that side of the house. I half expected him to hide from me for the rest of the night, and I would’ve been happy with that.

No, he wanders back in a little bit starts cuddling on my legs. I pick him up, examine the his claws (to see which cat it is, they’re twins) then dump him back on the floor.

While I was writing this he came back a second time — he’s really docile. I guess he figured he really screwed up and is asking for forgiveness or something. I’ve not yet dumped him — he is actually being really, really nice…

humph.. Gotta give it to him for manipulating me. He’s almost as good as Jenni….

So I screwed up, and posted what was supposed to go to the Interesting Websites section and posted it here. (Both are MovableType blogs)

Marshall was quicker than me and commented on it before I caught my mistake. Applicable Interesting Websites entry is:

• Wheres the 757?
  – This has been hanging around my bookmarks for quite some time. If you look at the pictures its pretty hard to figure out where a 757 managed to hide itself in the Pentagon.. [May, 1 2005]

I’m amazed at my unique ability to induce food poising upon myself.

Its been one of those odd nights.

There are a bunch of decisions I made back during 2002 and 2003 that I still think are good ones, but they haunt me because I wish other people also would adopt them. These aren’t small yes or no decisions, but broad decisions about how I want to live my life.

The one that is particularly haunting me is that I decided to very firmly believe that I am the only person who controls my emotions and attitudes. This is not to say that I’m not influenced by others. For example, when someone pisses me off, I of course credit them for instigating the state of being pissed off, but I also recognize that I have allowed myself to be pissed off by their actions. The emotion is mine and mine alone. Attached to this is that I do my damnedest to keep a balance equilibrium. Meaning that I might’ve had a day where I was pushed and battered by all sorts of instigators during the day, but for the most part I kept my cool, and by the end of the day I’m back to my equilibrium.

Similarly when I make a stupid decision I make a point to own that decision and the consequences of it.

My problem is that one of my friends that I hang out with a bunch doesn’t subscribe to the balanced equilibrium theory. His moods last for weeks, during which he’s not fun or even interesting to be around. I’m at the point where I’m just not going to spend any time with him, it just isn’t worth my time. I understand the concept of being there to support someone, but it doesn’t feel like I’m even doing that.

Adding fuel to my current confusion is that I’ve had someone who has re-entered my life from my seminal 2002 and 2003 period. The ironic thing is that during the time I was with him I exhibited the antithesis of being in control of my emotions and attitudes.

Topping all this off, I’ve been struggling with wanting to add something onto my plate. I feel a wee-bit unfulfilled. I’m missing some combination of musical vocal performance, theatrical work, or community service. All those activities have at one time or another played a huge role in my life and I found them incredibly rewarding. Although now they play virtually no role in my life.

The problem here is that I am already busy, and I’ve been burnt on all three of them at one time or another. Unsurprisingly mostly of the roasting occurred during the 2002 and 2003 period.

My echoes are finding me. Time, decisions and emotions ripple through my fabric, disorienting me, forcing me to choose what I want to hold onto.