Highly ticked in a high tech world.

Test from iphone

Posted via web from egoiste's posterous

Him: Here's your power adaptor back. The drive is powered over USB.

Me: Really? What kind of drive is it?

Him: A laptop drive

Me: yes but what kind of drive?

Him: It's from a Dell

Me (Gritting teeth and making noticeable faces): You're just not going to answer me ARE you?

Him: It's an IBM drive.

Me: Get out.

So my sister is that word that people hates that starts with a C, right?   Well ok maybe not so much, but she does see things in more stark practical terms than other people do.

My oldest nephew is graduating and having a bbq. Patricia refused to invite my mother's family because she says they have not made themselves part of his life, so why should she?  In a practical sense, I completely agree with her.

When I pressed her on this about myself, after having told me that it would mean a lot to her personally that I be there, she did the math in her head. I told her son, hey, I don't really know you. I have not really been a part of your life. Do you care if I am at your bbq? He said no not really. He's 18. He doesnt really care if anyone but his closest friends are there.

So she agreed, okay, maybe I don't really need to be there. But I know she's like any parent, quietly proud of him and wants to share that with her family. There's the rub. She has a ....well gay people understand this a bit more...different definition of family. For her, it's not so much like the gays, families are not something you are born into, they are something you form.  She insists that if our grandmother were to run into Javi in the grocery store, she would have no clue who he is. 

Compounding the issue is the fact that Steve is getting married. We are invited to a reception after his JP nuptials are performed.  I was not present during this argument, but when he was asked if HE was inviting those same family members and replied no, not a word was said. Patricia was infuriated.  This may have sent her over the edge and she has now vowed that she will never make any obligatory family visits to my parents' home. You know, Mother's Day, etc.

I don't know. I was kind of raised with the old school ethic that there are just some things you just DO for and with family. It's diplomacy. It's decorum. It's considerate. These things are just custom, and for kids like us who have said screw custom, nobody likes me for what I truly am, I'm living life for me now, custom can be overbearing or downright useless (speaking for my sister). She may not care for my grandmother and her aunts, but my mother does. It's a family bbq and she thinks her mother and sisters should be invited, even if she knows they won't go, because that's protocol.

For my brother's reception, it's simple math. 100 guests at X dollars a head. We alone are 7 with the inlaws and outlaws and not including my jailbird brother.  However, he too is of the quiet opinion that he doesnt really care about other family beyond a howdy. I am older and have had different experiences with most of my extended family. I am eldest so I was ingrained with a deeper sense of family and for nurturing of family. I struggle with my sense of obligation and my sense of individuality just the same.   I told my family this weekend that I am not the kind of person who needs things or asks for them. They were the ones who insisted to me that one day I just might need them and it is not right for me to feel that I shouldnt.

As for the bbq, I'm just not going. I was just there last weekend. I hate to drive and I hate to travel.  Mom is now refusing to go partly because of my sister and partly because Javi popped off at her and said "good" when she said she wasn't going, whether in jest or not I dont know. Dad says mom has gotten sensitive in her older age (and we have only gotten more INsensitive), but I don't know if he's kidding or not. I guess he wasnt.  I don't need to be in the middle of a family squabble either because that's just a waste of my time.

They are both very strong and strongly opinionated women. They just need to realize that the only reason they fight is because they love each other so much. 

Perhaps I don't bother fighting with them anymore is because I don't?

Evil Plan (tm)! http://www.darksites.com/evilplan.php

Your objective is simple: Soul Accumulation.

Your motive is a little bit more complex: Hatred for all mankind

Stage One

To begin your plan, you must first seduce a famous actor/actress. This will cause the world to sense a grave disturbance in the force, unsettled by your arrival. Who is this despoiler of all that is good and nice and true? Where did they come from? And why do they look so good in classic black?

Stage Two

Next, you must sabotoge the internet. This will all be done from a abandoned church, a mysterious place of unrivaled dark glory. Upon seeing this, the world will fall into catatonic trances, as countless hordes of computer programmers hasten to do your every bidding.

Stage Three

Finally, you must reveal to the world your opening of the seven seals, bringing about the apocalypse. Your name shall become synonymous with the spice girls, and no man will ever again dare sneer cruelly at your disfigured face. Everyone will bow before your extraordinary charisma, and the world will have no choice but to restore your credit rating.

Got a nudge that I needed an update so here I am.

Everybody's twittering or facebooking these days and LJ has fallen off the wayside all around. When you start to embellish on the minutia, I think you lose focus of the bigger picture or the..I guess I'll call it the "landscape of our lives". We no longer seem to have a story to tell. Instead what we have is lots of little raindrops but no pool. For me, though, I just don't LJ, and never have, because nothing of significance happens to me.

But there was that one thing. My longtime drinking buddy, Paisano2K killed himself. If you're a longtime diabetic and you skip 4 days of insulin, what else could you call it but suicide? Most of the people I know who've heard about it expressed anger instead of loss. We all hated him as much as we loved him because he was just full of shenanigans. People full of shenanigans piss us off but when they're not pissing us off, we can have a lot of fun around them. Until you've had enough.

The weirdest thing, and I don't know about you, or if it's just cuz I'm an egotist, is that I found myself wondering about MY position at the funeral. Is that crazy? I found myself waiting to see if anyone would pay special notice to ME. I guess what we, or I, want to know is, did we have some kind of impact on this person's life? Did we have enough of an impact that after 8 years, his mother would remember us? Of course I'd be most closest to lesbican sister, swimming in the same circles and all. What we, what I, want to know is, Did we waste all that time together? What we, what I, want to know is, can I validate myself?

I never revealed myself to mother and stepfather til that final moment where you pass the family and express your sympathies on your way out of the cemetary. I said I dont know if you remember me but my name is Felipe. She cleared her eyes of her sadness to actually focus on my face, as did her husband, and she said yes yes of course she remembered me, and she held me tight and close as her husband held my hand. She offered ME comfort.

Things like this happen and I wind up hating myself, or at the very least doubting. I walk away thinking why am I such a shitty person? When Jeb passed away I choked up some but I was fully prepared for his death at least a full year, year and a half, because he TOLD me he was dying. The slow walk, the lesions he refused to show people, well, he was a zombie already.

Paisano died and I just wished I could feel more than I did. Some folks said oh you just don't have a public grieving face. They're like that too, they just bottle up their feelings. I've been an out of sight out of mind character for a while because I just move on, you know, and Paisano had been away for most of my sobriety, which will be 9 years in June. I chalked it up to that. Better that than to admit what I've been telling myself for a very long time. I have trouble grieving because 9 years ago, I died, And that was the week Paisano died for me too.

testing another social service please excuse @egoistetx
Reference: http://c.notify.me/NZESAA

Get your twitter mosaic here.

I've been reading Rant by Chuck Palahniuk. It's a gas. If you want something out of the ordinary to read, this fits. It's written in interview form, so it's not exactly linear. That makes it post-modern, right?  Looking forward to more Palahniuk.

I had a very productive weekend, for me. Had a flat tire repaired, got my oil did. did my taxes.

PAID OFF 2700 IN CREDIT DEBT OH MY GOD THAT HURTS.

Really it doesnt. It's like monopoly money to me. I dont know why but for the longest time i've kept a 1000 dollar bank cushion because of car trouble I had a few years back. So for me, that's not real money. And I guess building a larger nest egg just made it more imaginary money to me too. But it was money in-hand. My logic was that my credit card had a set 4% rate til paid in full. If i charged anything new, 18%. So better to keep cash on hand just in case, right? I've been like 8 years without just in case!

I started considering my kitty New Truck Down Payment. I don't even need a new car. I've had mine 8 years and still only have 63K and it started with 30K. I just feel sort of incomplete without a truck. I bought my CRV when I had friends. What a riot that is now. I'd been sending 300 dollar payments on my Visa so I guess if i don't change my lifestyle much, that 300 in savings will build up rather quickly, on top of my regular 220 dollar automatic savings input. At 520 bucks a month in savings, that should build a nice new car down payment.

Paying half on a new car. How awesome would that be? I'm not even considering trade-in value of the car. Bluebook value at its age is probably shit.

Tax refund is for new orleans, obviously.

Grown-up types tell me don't think about the car. Get a condo. I just don't think I'm built that way. Ownership just seems so, I dunno, gross. Perhaps I drank too many beers with Marxists when I was younger.  I look at it this way. I'm 40. I hope I don't live long enough to care about owning my own home with condo fees and HOA fees and taxes and insurance and escrows and blah blah blah. It's just too much drama for someone like me.  I foresee myself just sort of being a remora and moving in with an old doddering gay with extry space and a lonely hearth.  Or boarding with Zombienought.  God only knows what spiffie will be up to if he ever actually goes to grad school.

Nevermind that none of my visions of life include a significant other. Is that depressing? I hadn't considered that because of my indomitable independence I guess.

I've developed a rhythm living alone now. During the week I do nothing. On the weekend I find excuses to leave the house during the day. Lunch. Groceries. Target for sundries.

I do my usual nights on the town.

spiffie got a job. He has yet to live up to his threat of having lunch with me. I've eaten in my office everyday for 22 years. He keeps fucking with my program.


Facebook and Twitter have been eating up my blogging needs I guess. Most of my random thoughts turn into tweets and so many LJers read either one or the other or both I feel like this is overkill here. But there are some who still just use LJ, and I did pay for that lifetime membership after all, so I feel guilty about not posting every once in a while.

It's interesting. throwingstardna uses loudtwitter for all his tweets and his fans seem to love it. It makes his LJ like a very long drawn out FB status update conversation.  but my chatter friends absolutely hate loudtwitter. I guess they're anti-social-media, or as I've stated "utilitarian" intarwebbers. It serves as a function. For the rest of us, it serves a function AND a diversion.  I don't know why people like that don't just send snail mail to each other. I mean really. That's right, I'm talking about YOU.

I tend to work the other way around though. Long thoughts go here and I import them as notes into FB where I have potentially 200+ readers.  Twits are mostly all on my facebook too, and/or here, so I don't post "egoistetx published a new blahg at [link]" like some folks do.  That was one of the things I hated about Myspace. All those bulletins "Just updated my blog. Please read." "Just uploaded new photos".  I guess I'm the same as the loudtwitter haters =]

I have streamlined my life at http://egoiste.storytlr.com/  Profilactic.com has my online "jump page" but I am liking storytlr.com as my complete funnel. Of course I have a self hosted backup for when the overlords take over.

I am loving the use of tr.im. It lets me guage the sort of things people who read my shizzle are interested in. Phelps bong stories and hot gays are definitely popular.  Current Events, not so much. I guess we all read the same stuff.  I encourage you to convert from tinyurl to tr.im.

This is classic ego-spiffie chat. Almost every conversation of ours runs this way. It’s very Abbott and Costello, methinks. I’m the fat one.

egoiste: are you drunk twittering
spiffie: I would never do that
egoiste: what’s with your OMG and the psych [tweet]
egoiste: ohhhh. does this relate to your quasi date
spiffie: si
egoiste: HOW did this happen
spiffie: we’re both equally lame so his friends pushed him into me on the dance floor at elysium on Sunday
egoiste: how did his friends know you were lame
egoiste: were you wearing your red atari shirt or something

( Dip into mah kool-aid  )

25 Random Things about Me. Caveat Temptor.

( Read more... )

spiffie is gone.
my drinking days are gone.
my bartender Jeff of about 10 years is gone
Jeb passed away and is gone
Paris Chanel is gone
my 30s are gone
7 years of yoga, gone
Bush is gone

Life as I knew it is officially over. Every last remnant of my rockstar drunkard years is gone.
I just don't know what to say. I only know that I have to start anew.

Make it count, Obama.

Aren't Comfilon's Kilt liners fabulous? If you've ever walked around like you're supposed to (if a king sits the throne, supposedly), that wool cloth or that utilikilt canvas can rub your boys the wrong way.

SAY NO MORE. This is for you. I'm sold. Link



No really! They're made for kilt wearers!

People are questioning my desire for mantyhose. Again I say UnderArmour==Mantyhose.
here's the story responsible for the latest mantyhose meme: sauce
I am partial to these. Are they me?

Goofy: San Antonio is a different town, though.   We went to IHOP on Sunday afternoon and lo and behold, the kitchen staff breaks out into a fist fight.
Goofy: I was so glad we already had received our food.
Me: LOL
Goofy: As we were paying, the clerk asked, "Everything okay?" Me: "Yeah, but I lost $5 on the fight. I picked the other guy..."

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Christmas break is both the worst and best time to move. Worst because of the expenses you already have with gift giving, and best because you have all that break time to move and theoretically get things in order.

Ihave yet to do the "order" part. I'm almost there. The problem is 20 years of living in Austin and this thing called accumulation. I need a neti pot for my life, it seems. I keep going through things and throwing them out feels like throwing away a part of myself, but I realize a lot of that stuff is a part of me that hasnt existed for a long time. They are substitutes for memory and should just go in the trash.

40 VHS tapes? I mean srsly? Off to Goodwill.  I don't even consider myself sentimental so it makes it ironic and silly, being a packrat.

I'm also a geek so what do geeks do? Oh I could maybe one day use this cable. That PC slot card to do wifi may come in handy for some aunt with an ancient computer you know. I have no less than 3 SLR cameras and I have not shot a single photo on film in about a decade!

Gone is the 10 year old shelved series 1 Tivo. Gone is the wedding dress from a drag show 8 years ago because, well, you just never know when you'll want that for a costume. (But you swear, SWEAR you'll unload those brick sized Verizon phones to that donation program they have for vets, or was it for safe space for battered women?). yeah right.

I did get rid of 7 giant hefty bags of clothing though. I still have a walk in closet full of hang up type stuff. A whole toychest full of just tank tops. A chest of drawers that fits most of my shorts and about half of my pants. An armoir full of tees and overflow. My wardrobe is a testament to my life. I always want options even though I already know what I'm never going to wear.

I have more to write but I think I'm going to space them out so I'll seem prolific and so anybody else who might read doesnt feel that TL;DR that I know I always do.

Me: it's about the only time he comes near me
Me: if i'm talkin to young nubiles
Goofy: Which is odd, cause he don't like blacks.
Me: dont be a tard
GoofinAround: He doesn't!
Me: nubiles, not NUBIANS
Goofy: WTF is a nubile, then?
Me: # Sexually mature and attractive. Used of young women.
Goofy: You'll have to give me an example next time.
GoofY: we're out.
Me: twinks gurl. twinks.
Goofy: OH!  NOW that scenario makes sense!

I'm still working out the verifications on an apartment over near the IRS. Traffic is not cute but it's still not the same as double the traffic time i'd have gotten living up or down Mopac.  I insisted on washer dryer connections. Insisted on short traffic time. I insisted on now. This place has it but you know, southeast austin has the 2nd highest crime rate. I figure I'm ok in a gated community cuz who really wants to steal a Honda CRV?  Frankly the only times I've had my car broken into it's been downtown and the same goes for other people I know.

Here's the rub. I was talking to a real estate fiend of mine, and he said he just sold a cute 1-1 condo on Woodrow for 111K.  I looked at my finances and the current average 6% home loan rate and with a down payment, I could have totally afforded this place!  So I guess I should maybe live out a new lease, save my ducats for a bigger down payment, and in maybe 9 months start looking to see if the loan rates drop to 4.5% as predicted and see if there are any cute tiny 1-1 condos or townhomes available then. He has another one in the same location which I could I guess try for, but I don't really want to chance the next 25 days on getting a loan on time, working with the sellers, etc etc in such a short time.

I could just kick myself in the butt though. But really it's all spiffie's fault, since he just sprung this on me. Everyone must hate the spiffie!