Osita’s Awesome Birthday
I'm not a big fan of anthropomorphizing pets. Dogs is dogs, they ain't people. Treating a dog like a person is unhealthy for the dog and crazy-making for the human.
That said, a few years ago after I got my dog from the pound I guesstimated a birthday for her, and every year my computer reminds me that it's her birthday. I don't do anything wildly special for her, but it's a nice excuse to remember to do something nice for her, in a life busy or draining enough that sometimes I forget to play with her enough or take her for enough walks. Yesterday I happened to be at a pet store buying her the dog food she'd run out of and right next to the register there was a little doggie cupcake, so I bought one for her. And in the evening we went for a sidecar ride down to her favorite cafe. As we sit there, her watching the people and my writing on my laptop, people come up constantly to pet her. I tried an experiment and told every person who came up that it was her birthday. It was amusing and heartwarming to see their reactions, people were extra nice to her extra excited to see her, and seven people bought her dog treats (they sell them at the cafe). I think that was a new record for her, in terms of people buying treats per hour. Her previous record was 13 people in one evening buying her treats, but that was over about 5 hours (and this time it was in just 2).
Ah, the life of a loved dog... If the Buddhists are right and I'm good enough this go 'round I hope my next reincarnation is as kind to me and as furry.
^Quinxy
The Microcosmic Reason I Hate Apple
Here is the perfect microcosmic example of my macrocosmic hatred of Apple's flawed, "We know better than our users." philosophy:
If you type the possessive "its" on an iPhone you will see it converted to the possessive contraction "it's" unless you take the additional action of canceling the replacement. The iPhone isn't intelligently considering grammatical context, it's just dumbly replacing it every time you try and type it, and Apple doesn't trust you to disable its auto-correct feature or believe you have the intelligence to correctly handle adjusting the individual replacements it does.
That is the epitome of Apple's arrogant user-interaction philosophy, and why I hate them.
^Quinxy
Me, The Quasi-Statistical Serial Killer
As part of my year of mischief, perhaps soon to become an age of mischievousness, I've adopted a policy of engaging in quasi-statistical serial murder.
If second hand smoking kills, then the first hand smoker must be the killer. To be fair it'd be more accurate to say the smoker is an attempted murderer. It's entirely possible their smoke has killed someone, but proving it was their particular puff that pushed another specific person into cancer or heart failure would be nigh impossible. One could extend the argument to say that since smokers indulge around more than one person on more than one occasion, and they are aware of the risk they are pushing onto others, smokers qualify as serial killers, albeit again of an attempted variety. A mortality statistician might be able to accurately guesstimate a lifetime average death toll, perhaps it'd be on the order of 0.04 victims per smoker, with any individual smoker perhaps being responsible for no deaths or dozens.
It has widely been suggested that cell phones may be the hidden health crisis looming in the future, the equivalent crisis for the next generation as cigarettes were for the last. The as yet unconfirmed but suspected carcinogenic nature of radio waves we all routinely ignore because the benefits they bring are just too delicious to deny. Smokers believed the doctors and the cigarette companies well through the first half of the last century, perhaps we'll do the same through this one with cell phones.
I don't smoke. But I like to play god with the best of them. I've decided that I will seek to expose others to second hand cell phone radiation, and the murdering that may or may not statistically follow. I won't do so freakishly, needlessly creating signals just to expose people, but if I'm tethering my computer to my cell phone or making a call, maybe I'll choose to be 3 feet away rather than 10 feet away from my potential victims. And come what may, I am apparently free to do it.
Now obviously I'm kidding, mostly, but I think it makes an important point. We all impact each other in potentially grave ways, ways we don't even completely understand. So as horribly odd as it might sound to intentionally gravitate towards others in an effort to expose them to greater levels of arguably statistically significant electromagnetic radiation, and therein attempt their murder, we're all doing the same thing in some form or other. It may be you driving a hybrid car which requires lithium dragged from the earth by inadequately protected miners under the boot of a corrupt government. It may be you tossing out coffee cups that leach chemicals into the Earth that end up in people's drinking water. We're all killing some part of somebody, and collectively it adds up to a grand conspiracy of serial murder. As long as we're doing it, we should at least be honest about it. I am.
^Quinxy
The Headphone Magic Trick
I had a real life magic trick happen to me today... It was pretty neat! I'll call it the "Re-Appearing Bose Earbud Trick". It will lose a lot in the retelling... but here goes.
The trick began last night when one of the rubber earbud caps came off my Bose headphones and disappeared. Poof! I knew it was lost in my car or at the motorcycle shop, I realized it was missing the moment I walked into my house last night. I looked everywhere for it this morning but it was clearly totally gone, never to be seen again. This afternoon I went to my desk drawer to fetch a replacement. The headphones ship with 3 pairs of rubber caps, one set for each of small, medium, and large. Since I had been using the large set, I expected to need to replace the missing one with a medium one. But no! The medium ones were there, the small ones were there, and there was one large one there, just like the one I was missing! It was as though the ear bud cap had been removed from me yesterday by magic and secretly snuck into my desk drawer by magic.
I'm still trying to figure out how this trick was done! I think I know, but I don't want to believe such a mundane explanation.
Truly this probably reads like a very boring story, it's too subtle... but I think interpreted by a good writer it could have been a sublime little story.
^Quinxy
Things I Hate & Love About Women: Volume XXIV
I started to write a very short list of two or three semi-humorous, semi-curious things I look to avoid in women and it somehow morphed into a longer, stranger list which would surely suggest many a neurosis to a trained psychoanalyst. Ah well... If one such therapist is reading, enjoy, and tell me what I've got and what pill will cure me. 
Obviously there are no hard and fast rules in love, I'm sure I'd forgive a girl nearly every item on this list if I loved her so and so.
I dislike:
- Pointy "witch" shoes. The ones that were popular a few years ago. Freaks me out. I do not want to date a witch!!! I don't not want to date a woman with voluntarily deformed feet. I don't like sharp angles. I mean, if you are an ice climber and these are for ice climbing, awesome, otherwise, NOOOO!
- Makeup. I never like it, but if you insist on wearing it, please don't use it to look unnatural.
- Red nail polish. I'm not really a fan of nail polish in general, but if you're going to do it, have fun, pick unconventional colors. The classic red is so done... Glow in the dark nail polish is a winner, black is a bit goth but I won't mind, grey might be cool, even orange or blue. No nail art, though!
- No long nails!!! I don't mind if a girl's nails are an 1/4" of an inch or something, the better she can play guitar with, but if your nails are long enough that you can't do some things, or they break, then ick! I have no idea why long nails would be fun or sexy for anyone. It's a whole lot of scratchy, scratchy, pokey, pokey, uselessness.
- High heeled shoes. Not a fan. I like tall women, sure, but I'd rather you just be your real height. We can pause sometimes on stairs and pretend if you want to imagine you are taller. I like Chuck Taylor Converse shoes on my women. Or other funky, fun shoes. I never want to hear a girl say to me, "Oh, I can't walk that far, because my shoes..." We are ambulatory people! Wear shoes you can walk, run, dance, play in! I don't like those odoriferous Petri dishes they call Uggz.
- Beer taste on the lips/breath. Ugh. Wine taste is slightly preferable, but still not my favorite. My favorite? Jolly Ranchers. I wish all women were always sucking on Jolly Ranchers, but from a variety pack, ideally reflecting their mood towards me. When they smelled of watermelon I'd know it was on...
- Lacy underwear or underwear with flowers. What makes that stuff sexy? I have no idea, they turn me off. Grandmothers wear that sort of stuff. Oddly, though, I find fishnet stockings sexy (though I've never encountered any in real life). I hope I'll be surprised with fishnets some day.
- Dainty watches. I hate that women are encouraged to wear tiny, dainty, functionless watches. Poor dears, they deserve the same rights to wear watches with tons of features like the men's. I once had a crush on a girl in a college physics class because she had a watch with a chronograph! A year later I was in a math class with her and I discovered that my crush was all built on a lie! The chronograph dials on the watch were just printed on the watch dial. The story of my life.
- Women who live within the limits of an inherited, "Women should do...". Some people just seem to think the world should be a certain way, and I'm no fan of that. I think the world should be the way you want it, screw society and its expectations; hard to do, but fight the good fight...
- Women who "know" they are very attractive. Nothing is uglier than arrogance. Confidence, being comfortable with yourself, feeling secure, those are grand things. Arrogance is quite another. Too many people on both side of the gender fence get their ego a bit stroked as a youth and spend the rest of their lives making people around them miserable.
- Women who use their feminine wiles to get men to do things for them (pay bills, buy dinners, move furniture, etc.). Using people sucks. You're one step up below an escort, at least escorts can be respected for their relative honesty and straightforwardness in their social exchanges. I haven't run into many of this sort, though. I did make a friend who soon after revealed to me she was sleeping with a guy because he would fill up her gas tank, and she was sleeping with another guy (at the same time) because he would take her grocery shopping, and another who... Oh dear, she was physically a beautiful girl, but not so much inside. Our friendship was short lived.
- Cowboy boots. I'm sure cowboy boots are probably perfectly suited for cowboys. But there is no excuse for any non-cowboys to be wearing them. A woman or man in cowboy boots in a city makes as little sense as them wearing ski boots.
- Smoking. Ugh. You have taken from me every ounce of interest I might have had in you and crushed it like you do your cigarette butts. You smell like an ashtray, you taste like an ashtray, and you reek of addictive behavior. Not for me.
- "Nude" Pantyhose. Ugh. I used to think I hated pantyhose generally, but now I realize it's just the "nude" or sheer kind I dislike, mostly because I don't like something pretending to be skin color, that's just creepy like a snake shedding its skin. And then at the crotch area the stitching on sheer pantyhose is right there, with flaps, and extra material, and I don't know... it's just weirdly complicated and unattractive.
Things I love with women:
- Winter wear! Hats, coats, sweaters, mittens/gloves! How I love layers! Women look pretty in them, and when the time comes for their removal it just makes things so much more fun! And put a woman in the snow, and wow! I like it when pretty white flakes of snow land on their noses. I would have been a very randy Eskimo.
- Women who like driving. There's something sexy about a woman who takes pride in her driving.
- Sweetness, tenderness, vulnerability. 'nough said.
- Multicolored socks/stockings. Japanese girls sometimes rock this look. But I don't know any. And I am a little afraid of the Japanese when it comes to the bedroom and their tentacle porn.
- Dancing. I'm a bit too self conscious to really enjoy dancing myself, but I like women who don't have that shyness and might move me past mine. I was once in a a gas station, in line, waiting to pay with my girlfriend of that time, and she started to dance subtly to whatever was on the radio they were playing. It was a truly beautiful moment; I loved her so very greatly in that instant.
- A yielding sexual aggressiveness. I don't want a woman to be all corpse-y, that's no good. But, neither do I want to be their bitch (nor they mine). I advocate for a position of relative, exchangeable equality, with each person taking that controlling interest at different times, a communism of sex. To each according to their sexual needs of the moment, from each according to their sexual ability of the moment, etc.
- Creativity. One of the most attractive things for me is creativity (however it is expressed, in their art, writing, or just the play of brilliant banter).
- Freethinkingnes-ish. In theory I like women who are freethinkers, but freethinking can also lead to freeacting which might include daily orgies and drug induced stupors and I'm not so keen on those. I'm looking for someone who's probably a bit like me, freethinking in mind, but more conservative (cowardly?) in action.
- Smilers. I love women whose smiles elevate me, and everyone else.
^Quinxy
Yin Yang
My day. Yin. Yang. The first half saw my better self, triumphantly in command of my life, amidst noble activities, pressed by people who variously care for, respect, and seek me out. The latter half saw my worser self, a soul periodically lost in self-analysis, striving for someone and something different (yet doing little more than cowardly navel gazing). We are the happily resigned marriage of our perfections and our flaws. Humans. Meh. If the aliens come I won't be overly upset if they make hamburgers of us all. (I don't really mean that, it just seemed a marvelous thing to say, would that I had the time to craft the sentence better and work the word 'ketchup' in there.) Sometimes I say things which are more beautiful than true, but I always indicate as much (even if not everyone realizes).
^Quinxy
The Meaning of Pizza
My tummy hurts. I just ate too much of a pizza, a pizza I had delivered from Chicago. From the best authentic Chicago pizzeria in Chicago, Lou Minati's. Shipped overnight, packed in dry ice. Hard not to eat too much of it. I bought it to craft a moment. But, the moment came and went, unhappened.
I met a harmless girl at the cafe a few weeks back. We had a perfect, orchestrated social interaction. I was like a conductor leading the interaction. It was one of my finest social moments ever. I hate the humans, a little bit. Which is to say I love them like God did back in the day. Back when they pissed him off and didn't do what he wanted and he didn't understand why, so he smote them all except for that Noah fella and all them critters. I don't plan on smiting anything, besides the grievous ethical problems, I'm just not that energetic. But I suffer God's misunderstanding of humans, from time to time. So, these little perfect moments mean something to me, when everything sings with a harmony that feels like it was always and forever just unheard. And I get excited thinking I found my groove.
And so I bought the pizza. She was a recent transplant from Chicago, weeks recent. And I smoothly asked her to join me on the weekend for the Hollywood Forever Cemetery movie with some friends. And she eagerly accepted. And I got the pizza because in the course of our conversation she'd recommended it, and told me you could get it online, and so I did. Because it's been years since I had a decent Chicago pizza, and there's only once place in the whole of Los Angeles that does a Chicago style pizza, and it's in Silverlake, and I wasn't sure how authentic it really was (it resembled not at all the Armand's Chicago-style pizzeria of my Washingtonian youth). And we talked a few times leading up to that Saturday, but then the day came, I called, and she suddenly had other plans. She flaked, but asked me to ask her again. Humans. I don't know what to make of them. I should make it clear my intentions were not unusual or extreme. This wasn't meant to be a date, I had no specific interest in her beyond her being interesting, the banter being fun, so let's pal around. I didn't find her attractive, but she was not necessarily particularly unattractive either. (All this I say relative to me, I have no idea what the rest of the world thinks of her. They probably found her prettier than I did, my tastes being a few degrees off the norm.) She was in that gray area where given the right interactions I may have come to find her prettier, but I had no such ambitions, my interest was purely platonic. And she flaked, and even though she very pointedly said she hoped I'd ask her again, when I did, I got a similar result. She was busy again with work, and her brother, and she is now traveling about the country on work errands. And, to my way of thinking, and I think the world's thinking as well, if she'd had any significant interest in hanging out, it would have happened by now. Ah well.
I don't mind that nothing came of it. I don't mind perhaps not being her cup of tea. I have no expectations that I be anyone's (though am grateful that I am some people's). And perhaps her new job is demanding, and her new apartment requires setting up, and her brother... but I just wish society didn't so much rely on subtleties and subtexts. Because I drown in the excess of available cues. And I miss out on quite a few friendships and dates as I always err on the side of caution. It's like if you know your sense of smell isn't so good, it's better to be safe than sorry and scream "Fire!" when you think you smell even the slightest hint of smoke; it's like the identical opposite, actually. I won't call her again. Two attempts on my part was enough. Who needs the bother?
I should perhaps stick with the people who make more native sense to me (though there are few).
The pizza was good. Some people (like my dad) have this charming notion that everything happens for a reason. Ah, pretty, lucky little imbeciles. If I believed them I would say, "I met her solely so that she could introduce me to Lou Minati's pizza."
^Quinxy
The Vintage Motorcycle Mechanic
A few weeks ago I started "working" at my friend's vintage BMW motorcycle shop. Rick Monahan, owner of Black Kat Motorwerks, needed some help and I wanted to learn how to fix old motorcycles. I think this particular sort of manual labor is good for me, a useful contrast to the more cerebral stuff I do in the dotcom space.
I split my time between helping him with the bikes and helping hi on the business side. I re-launched his website (redid the one I originally made for him 3-4 years ago). I also have been promoting his shop and getting him out to promote it himself, such as at the recent Venice Vintage Motorcycle Rally.
^Quinxy
The Me of Hidden Variables
On a handful of occasions it has been suggested that I am complicated.
While I think that may be a reasonable impression formed, I am of a somewhat contradictory view. My complexity is merely the illusion created by the hiding of the variables which govern me.
One alternate notion about quantum mechanics that I believed before I knew other more intelligent and PhDed fellows already came up with it (my life is filled with devastating cleverness I exhibit only to find that someone got there 50 years before, it's very frustrating) is the notion that the randomness we think we see at the subatomic level is not randomness but are the unpredictable effects of intrusions from energy/matters/forces in higher dimensional space-time. And I don't mean the words energy or forces in the new agey sense! I mean it in the literal sciencey, non-paranormal sense! These intrusions are hidden variables, we can't directly know what's going on in these higher dimensions, all we see is their effect on our own, and to us the effect appears random, but really had we omniscience enough to know the goings on of the higher dimensions, it'd be just as deterministic as Newton's apple. So, my theory of myself is that I'm as simple as cheddar cheese, but my cheese is simply being twisted through a biased filter of social whateverthehell and so appears complex. I hate the sorts of people who intentionally complicate themselves, who crave and craft a view of themselves as different. Hopefully I'm not one of them.
^Quinxy
Sometimes I Hate the Humans
We hate what we don't understand, and that's why sometimes I hate the humans. Technically, I am a human, too. But, I am the exception; I make complete sense*.
Clearly if the world and its many inhabitants tend to confuse me, it's assuredly in me that the trouble lies; I'm not so arrogant as to assume that it could be otherwise. And the humans are not truly so confusing, I suppose, for they are predicable. That which doesn't surprise should not confuse... But where I get routinely tripped up is in those irregular and brief moments when things make a kind of unfamiliar but overdue sense... and I make the fatal mistake of feeling into believing the world has finally been set right, that I have finally hit upon the grand unifying equation for living my life: that I have found my groove, my niche, my self.
It comes when the girl who shouldn't like me does, when the stranger suddenly becomes the friend, when my written words find a brief delighted audience, when there is resonance... and the universe has found my harmonic, or I, its.
These last few weeks have seen one undoing peculiar interaction flow into another undoing peculiar interaction: nothing rotten, but nothing right. I am grateful in these teasingly queer moments that days have endings, that weeks have endings, that years have endings, and that perhaps the end is the beginning.
^Quinxy
* I make complete sense to me, whether or not I make sense to others is speculative; I do at least go to great lengths to volunteer the information necessary for me to be understood.