Path to Enlightened Insanity

• Starbucks still tastes just as good. Plus you get to impress the baristas with something they’ve never seen before, my Duetto Card.
• Canadians do say “eh?” Its not some messed up american joke about our northern neighbors. No they don’t say it as much as we think, but they do. Eh, it makes the language more interesting.
• All the signage is similar to the signage in the US, except you have French instead of Spanish.
• Milk comes in a bag. While I’m not sure for the exact reason for this, I assume it has something to do with that a bag ends up being cheaper and more environmentally friendly.
• I still despise malls, even Canadian ones.
• This exchange rate thingy distorts my sense of value. I’m currently getting the Canadian dollar for about .80 US cents. So Starbucks Coffee seems even more expensive here. Also, seeing a gas price of C$.77, while on first glance seems really cheap (especially to an american used to gas for US$2.00), is for 1l per Canadian dollar. So it translates into C$2.91 per US Gal or about US$2.33.)

Notes about America:

• GM’s headquarters — well it makes me think that their executives are insecure about something, either their market position or their penis (or vagina) size. Its the tallest set of building on the whole skyline of the area. Its not just one tower, but a collection of no less than five.
• US Post Office has a knack for wasting money on useless things. There is a rather large, four story or so building directly on the Detroit River. It appears to be a sorting/processing facility. The building has a large sign that states “United States Post Office” that faces the river, the sign is large enough and mounted high enough that nobody on the US side can read it, it is only for the consumption of boats on the river and people on the Canadian side of the border. Glad to know the USPS is being fiscally responsible. (In their defense, the sign appears to be c1975.)

Other Notes:

• Forgetting to bring a coat to Canada in November is a pain in the ass. Err, to be more accurate is a recipe for Nick ice cube.
• Typing on your laptop sitting by the Detroit River at 5:07 pm on a day in November, is a formula for frozen hands and a really really slow typing, with a high error rate.

So for those of you who thought I was joking about going to Canada this weekend: Nick has left the country.

Initial impressions:

• I think all of Northern Kentucky is taking a short migration up to Windsor. I saw one car from Boone county in the states between Toledo and Detroit, and the car I was behind at customs at 3:30 am was from Kenton, the same county I’m from.
• There is nothing inherent about Canadian road design that makes it harder to get lost. Not less than three turns into the country I had gotten lost.
• The custom officer is actually friendly at three in the morning. He actually asked me which way my county went on Tuesday. Perhaps I’m not the only one with this idea
• Windsor is a real college town. Not that half-assed Fairborn shit.
• I somehow landed a hotel on Priceline thats bigger than my apartment.
• This is also the first time I’ve seen a recycle bin in a hotel room. (Yes, I’ve used it.)

Well.. I’m looking forward to a relaxing few days….

In case you didn’t realize from my Dick quoting post, I was a bit frustrated when Kerry conceded. This coupled with the fact that I know that some of my family voted for w in Ohio. Nonetheless I was a bit pissed.

If they’re going to get a from me pass on this one I don’t know. While I know choosing a President should not be decided a single issue, it often is by individuals. As much as the aforementioned family members theoretically profess to care about me, voting for someone with such a bigoted attitude toward me doesn’t bode well in my book. (Yeah, I’m going to hold a grudge.) I’ll take responsibility for not talking with them about same-gender marriage and that I’m still of draft age for another year, but I assume that they’re smart.

I know that this could be perceived as self-centered and self-serving. It is. There is undeniably nothing wrong with defending your own interests when it does not hurt or infringe on the rights of another. Family should look out for one another. In this case I feel that my family has turned a blind eye to my best interests. Yes, this election is personal. When you have the leader of the free world describing your relationships and you as wrong, its personal, no other way about it.

So here is my game plan for the near future. I have a novel to write, you can check up on my progress at my NaNoWrimo Author Profile page. I feel content with my current word count, while it is low, it is in the range of the current word count of others who won last year.

Other items on the game plan for the near future include going to Canada. (No, I’m not moving, just a little road trip.) I’m quite sure that sometime around w’s first election I said if he was reelected I’m moving to Canada. I have myself a bit of a predicament here. I wrote in the beginning of May that I’m not moving until I’m 185. While thats a bit overblown, I still want to somehow keep both of my pledges to myself. (i.e. Go to Canada because w was reelected and not move, because its a pain in the rear) So I’ll be spending the weekend in Windsor, Ontario. I need to get away from this and wait for it to blow over a little, little bit. As one of my favorite bloggers has simply, but brilliantly elaborated, life goes on. (Also check it out for my mini-blog entry. (yes that was self aggrandizing.))

I’m going to end this entry with an excerpt from December 15, 2000 written in my my Spilling Open (Its like a Journal, but not. One of my teachers was inspired by Spilling Open : The Art of Becoming Yourself and had us all start Spilling Opens for our “Creative Writing” class. (yeah I’m scarred for life from that course.))

I am confident that its flashback reveals that I’m an optimist.

Without further adieu here is the entry:

Dec 15, 20000

[An arrow pointing towards a scrawling note written about 6 am or so after election 2000] This letter, an idea why I am so wrapped up in this — No doubt. I have seen the legal/political battle of Election 2000 as a personal struggle. Why would something like an election provoke a deeply personal response?

In someways I see it as a macro view struggle of my gay peer’s struggles. The fact that the christian churches feel a need to think deny me a legal right to love whom I want to love, and share profoundly and devoutly in my partners life pisses the living shit out of me. These are the same people who not 100 years ago fought to prevent interracial marriages.

While I realize that a president cannot change policy on his own, he has a Republican lead congress – which means he has great power. George W. Bush has expressed a desire to restrict Abortion, Gay Marriage, Women’s rights among others to this I say fuck you. Keep your hand out of my life. I am angry about this election, I see it as a legal coup while Bush has exposed being bi-partisan he could not accept one of the many olive branches his opponent offered him — So much for brining the parties together — great way to start out with a lie reinforced by inaction. Down w/ Bush.

Fuck.

I watched I ♥ Huckabees the other day. Its one of the oddest movies I’ve seen in a while. In the vein of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Gattaca to name a few. Essentially its a movie where the filmmakers set out not to tell a story but to explore a philosophical idea. In this case the plot is subservient to the philosophy. (This is a much better alternative than the plot being subservient to special effects, you only get crappy action or sci-fi movies that way.)

This one asks multiple questions, one of them is: “How am I not myself?”

If you’re going to be a literalist, you’re always yourself. But being a literalist isn’t very interesting, and well is a bit limiting.

But its an interesting question. One I realized I’ve been working at for a while, and even attempted to pin down in such ominous and/or bland sounding documents as Personal Marketing and Personal Statements of Purpose. I also listened to an interview on NPR with Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman . The part that is relevant here occurs about in about six minutes into the interview. Those documents are not me. Many times I wish they were me, but they’re not. I try to get there, and I think many of us try to get to our ideal but we have to compromise with the actual world.

I’ve been kicking around going by the name of Cliff for a while. While that is still me (Cliff is derived from my middle name) part of it is a motivation to make a bit of a fresher start. (not a fresh start, I’m not looking to be birthed again)

Part of this is I look back on all of the records which comprise part of the history of “Nicholas Barnard” and well many of them don’t look so great.

• I’ven’t left a job on good terms in about four years. (Excluding the temporary position that came to an end.) Its not to say that I wasn’t a good employee, but when I left it wasn’t pretty and left me in an “unrehirable status.”
• School-wise I’m on college number four, and its going just grand. (sarcasm)
• Theatrically, I’ve done a bunch of good things, but I’ve also incinerated my bridges with nuclear bombs.
• Dating, I won’t touch.
• Writing/Programming, they’re both littered with loads of false starts, and no finished products.

This isn’t to say I’ven’t done some very good things, and I know the people who know me well think highly of me, which counts more than the failures I see. To be fair to myself I do have positive attributes to each of the above complaints about myself, its just I remember the negatives more strongly than the positives.

For balance here’s the list of things I’m proud of:

• Nick’s Place (i.e. My website) I’ve managed to put a huge amount about myself here, plus keep the dang thing organized and sane to manage. (Previous websites I’ve worked on spiraled out of control into crazy insane works that ended up driving me nuts, and became very hard to manage and update.)
• My friendships. It sounds like an odd thing to be proud of, but I’m actually pretty picky about who I surround myself with and who I call a friend.
• My values and my ability to strive towards them. I’m the first to admit that I do not fully live upto all of them, but the direction I tend to move in is one of improving compliance with my values. (No, they’re not “family values” or “liberal values” or some other similarly crazy system of prepackage values that people don’t fully understand or even agree with, although they profess them.)
• Levity. I’m not the one to make a good joke, but I can keep things funny and light, even if its others laughing at how bad my jokes are, I know they’re bad and I’m also laughing at my joke’s Grade ZZ level.

Okay but back to the point of Cliff. I’m wanting to make a break, and steer away from the crap I’ve done in the past.

So to start off I’m going to be using the pseudonym Cliff on my new novel that I’m writing with National Novel Writing Month I have no idea at the moment what exactly its going to be about, but I’d expect it to be more in the vein of I ♥ Huckabees or the like. So I start writing it sometime around November 1.

Yeah, Cliff is getting off to a great start…

Apparently I missed the memo that we were supposed to be playing bumper cars in Cincinnati today. I was driving home on the best poorly designed Interstate in the country. (I-75 in any Ohio city) There were no fewer than three single car accidents; people just decided that it was time to run into the wall on the side of the highway.

I don’t really get what is too hard about driving in rain of any volume. Its a relatively simple ratio that needs to be followed, as the volume of rain falling increases, your speed needs to decrease, at the same time you need to increase your following distance (in seconds). Is this so hard people?

I am a less efficient driver when I’m in Ohio, because people don’t use turn signals and the like; ergo, I have to drive much more defensively. Ohio knows this an issues their drivers mandatory front and rear plates for their cars, they want to know who you are coming or going. In Kentucky, they trust us enough just to know us by our rears.

In other driving news, I have been noticing a curious epidemic of prenegotiated alternative traffic patterns. (An epidemic in this case is two instances in a month, but given that this is an incalculable increase in the eighty-seven months I have been driving, I feel completely justified in using the word epidemic. If you don’t feel that is justified then I’ll justify it by wanting to induce fear. (oh wait I’m neither GWB or BG))

Onto the actual description. I assume most people are as flummoxed as I was about the concept of a prenegotiated alternative traffic pattern. Essentially at two instances when I was waiting at a stop light people rolled down their windows and yelled and asked permission to execute a traffic pattern not prescribed by the code laid onto the road. During both instances I agreed out of bewilderment with the whole concept.

While I don’t plan on instigating any other prenegotiated alternative traffic patterns I will keep my eyes out for other instances of traffic hippies. Oh and bumper car drivers as well..

Cincinnati Bell sucks. Their billing service is substandard as I’ve previously noted. Their DSL model is the most funkitified thing I’ve met. Finally their technical ISP acumen is pathetic.

Okay now some detail.

The billing service I’ve already covered, but I’ll add one more item on, their whole web design focus is far to centered on catering to Microsoft Internet Explorer users. I actually had to call the customer service rep to reset my password, a majority of the call consisted of interrogating me if there was a copy of Internet Explorer somewhere on my computer. (I’ve deleted the Mac version, its even crappier than the windows version.) After I arguing with the rep for a while conceded and started to load up Windows 98 on VirtualPC. Around the same time he finally gave up on me and just asked me for the information over the phone and logged in as me and did what I needed to do. (Something tech reps are not supposed to do, but oh well.)

Oh and another thing about the Microsoft Centricness. I’m not against Microsoft software, I just find it much harder to get it to work properly and efficiently. Cincinnati Bell’s billing system is hosted on Microsoft web and database servers. I have no problem with this, if it works.. I despise that well it, doesn’t work. Anytime I have to load my bill up online I need to load it twice, the first request being a collection of Microsoft Server errors, the second being the actual bill.

Okay onto the real reason that got me onto this subject. My DSL is down, it has been down for three hours. To top this off there is no tech support rep to get a hold of to fix and or consult about the problem, and their network status page happily proclaims that everything is working fine.

Imbeciles.

(I have to go review George Bush’s tax return again and make sure he doesn’t own Cincinnati Bell, because the hallmark of his management skills are quite evident at Cincinnati Bell.)

So I might be happier if I was able to get a hold of someone, but they’re closed from Midnight to 7 AM. This relates into my feelings about The 8 AM Regime, if a company wants to keep my business they should offer 24 hour service. Thats only fair to those of us who are up and doing work at 3 AM in the morning.

To top it off this is a monopoly service. Unlike other DSL markets where you can get your service from another company with Cincinnati Bell you’re stuck into buying the connectivity from them, dealing with their crappy model where you by the DSL service from them, and then buy the connectivity from someone else. Its the dial up model all over again. (Which incidentally is better than the DSL/Cable model because there is built in redundancy, with DSL/Cable you’re stuck with an unregulated monopoly, at least when you had dialup the telephone line was a regulated monopoly that had a legally required uptime of 99.999% now you have unregulated crap with an unregulated uptime. I want DSL to start putting in service level agreements at the residential price points.)

So instead of being able to purchase DSL from Speakeasy (I had the best service from them, albeit most expensive service, but I had a rarer line type.) and letting them handle the tech support and buffer me from the crap of the telephone company I now have to deal directly with the crap of the telephone company with no additional service and the headache’s of their imbecile service and crappy substandard equipment.

Unfortunately cable isn’t an option, and even if it were I’m not sure they’d be much better. This area is ripe for some competition, perhaps fixed wireless?

Okay, I am completely disturbed. I’m sitting at my favorite unfindable Starbucks in Newport reading my October Wired. [I’m finally up to date on the magazine reading… well almost I’ve got a backlog of 12 magazines, three Cargos (which is facing the possibility of an unceremonious cancellation), three Advocates (which just were extended till around 2008 or so.), two Out Travelers (the near useless ride along to The Advocate sometimes), a Vegetarian Times (how the hell I got a subscription to this I don’t know, but I do know I didn’t pay for it), a MacAddict, and a Technology Review. (both of which are under consideration for their usefulness.]

But back to the point after the list of the USPS supporting material I am in possession of. The one thing I really like about this Starbucks, is well its has two sets of comfy chairs, which in Starbucks land is almost unheard of. I’m sitting in one set of them and across the way is the other set, which is currently occupied by two teenage girls. What prompted a fit of laughter and well distain for speaking the same language as the girls is the indescribable high usage rate of the word “like” by one of the girls. I debated the merits of counting the number of times she used the word like within say a two minute period and then presenting to her her like rate per minute. I would estimate that it is somewhere around fifteen usages per minute. Okay but here is the thing that really disturbs me. I caught a glimpse of her shoes, and low and behold she has the same celtic green chuck taylors that I have and really like for their inherent coolness and dorkiness. So now I feel in some disturbed way compelled to go home and incinerate my pair, because they’ve been like contaminated, and thats well like unacceptable.

Another thing I’d love to give her a copy of this entry.. although the logistics to do so are annoying..

Okay in other news I’ve discontinued the external chemical influencing of my serotonin and norepherine levels, to surprisingly positive results. Although I have noted that I’ve been having more of a bitter wit, which I so love.

Okay now the chuck taylor like destroying girl and her friend are taking a picture of themselves with the arm length method. Sometimes I just feel that I should carry a gun with tranquilizer darts to neutralize nuisances like these two, I mean its for the public good, and someone has to take responsibility for it, and politicians will claim that they look out for the public good but they’re really just looking out for their own hides in so many ways. Someone has to make the hard choices and take the heat, and I am the one to do it. Or so I believe at the moment.

Okay a related thought to this is I’ve been debating what to do with the inordinate number of people who currently have Bush/Cheney stickers on their cars. (or the even more annoying variant, the W’04 circle sticker) I was originally planning on purchasing black spray paint and marking over the offending advertising on the road. Then I thought, “Hey I’ve got these Kerry/Edwards stickers, it would be nicer just to put those over the offending bumper stickers, at least this way I’m not damaging their car…. (snicker)” Okay but enough about the ethics of annoying political crap. I will leave this topic with one thought. In the game Tropico you can choose not to hold elections, the text is something along the lines of “the people do not know what they truly want” then something about not having elections.

Dang, that was a dribbling piece of diarrhetic crap. You know how they prevent the same variety of anal leakage from cadavers? They sew their asshole shut. (I’m not making this up.) Now think of the indignity of a gay man who dies and has their asshole secured from anal leakage. There thats something for you..

So I ran across Kerry’s gay conundrum by Chris Bull. I was actually kinda annoyed by the thing.

Okay, so Kerry has a great pro-gay, stance in so many ways. But, he doesn’t support gay marriage (he only calls for civil unions) and he hasn’t made gay rights a direct stump issue.

My take? Who cares? Any reasonable gay man would take just about any other politician other than George W. Bush.

But let’s step back from that and work a quick hypothetical: I’m the same in every conceivable way, except that I’m heterosexual. I’d still want Bush out of office. Surprisingly some of my straight friends seem to actually want Bush out for his anti-gay stance more than I want him out for his anti-gay stance.

GWB provides a great figurehead to direct anger towards. I once was saw Mois

Okay that dang federal budget thing too too much time.

So here are my notes on the debate last night:

• Kerry delivered a strong performance, but I want more details on his Iraq plan and how it is differentiated from Bush’s current plan (the actual on the ground plan the the diplomatic portion, I think Kerry has made himself very very clear about the diplomatic portion)
• GWB embarrassed the country with his physical posture. He slouched half of the time, and had a disrespectful look when he was listening to Kerry. Regardless of their differing positions, I expect a president to be able to be cordial to an opponent when at a negotiation table, summit, or debate. He failed at this tonight.
• Kerry has to be more personable at the next debate. He was an excellent statesman tonight, but not exactly very personable.
• GWB seemed to have trouble flat out composing his answers. It is acceptable, and even admirable to stop and compose your thoughts before speaking, it isn’t acceptable to flounder like a fish out of water, even if you are a fish out of water.
• GWB’s wander then charging drive home to end his response reminds me of a cornered rat, just trying to get something that seems substantial out of his mouth before stopping
• Kerry needs to look into the camera. Bush did this very well several times and likely will help him in connecting with the average voter.
• Kerry needs to figure out how to differentiate himself on the radio. GWB comes out unprofessional on the television, but he holds is own on the radio. The sound bites will be replayed and replayed. Make yours stick

I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to watch the debate again, because I may feel a need to attack the screen when GWB is speaking, and I cannot afford to replace my laptop..