Lunar Obverse - Page 25 of 276 - The bright side of a Moon

They’d Pay You Less If They Could

Participants at the first fully organized ILGWU general strike, known as the 'Great Revolt,' Union Square, 1909.

The idea and policy of Minimum Wage (MW) is an area of particular study for me. Since my politics have shifted further and further left, I have noticed how businesses (and therefore capitalists) argue against paying their employees a living wage. Time and again, I would see the same assumptions and pleas to common sense brought up, and I would think to myself, “Self, is that assumption true?” When a business owner claims that raising the Minimum Wage will cost jobs, for example, the skeptic in me counters with “does it?”

What I would see is arguments against minimum Wage that treated the policy like it was some untested theory. In fact, that is not true. Since MW was implemented 80 years ago, we now have a large body of real-world examples to examine after the fact. We should, therefore, be able to tell what effects the MW caused. Actual effects on existing economies. These aren’t theories, and we don’t have to rely on thought-experiments or common sense. We can base our judgments of MW on reality.

Reality’s Left-Wing Bias

Crazy, I know. Reality, as has often been claimed, has a left-wing bias. Science and observation are not really in vogue among a large group of leaders and policy-makers, not mention a significant segment of our population. And yet, here I am, arguing for those very qualities. Clearly, I am a communist.

I have a lot of notes stashed away from paying attention to what pundits have to say about Minimum Wage. I’ve shared a few here and there. I’m not sure my daily 500-1000 words is the right place to lay some of them out; but someday, I will write that article (or book; there’s more than enough material for the idea). An article with lots of citations would take more effort than I have this lazy, rainy, Sunday morning. I’d rather expound on my own ideas and philosophy regarding the topic and why it’s important to me.

OK, first of all, morally I’m against the whole idea of wages (it’s true: I am anti-capitalist. There. I said it.) There are fundamental needs that every human being requires for life: food, shelter, healthcare. Young or old, rich or poor, everyone needs those things, at all times as they move from birth, through life, to death. To say that one person gets X amount of dollars to pay for their basic needs, but another person gets X times 2 (or times 10, or times 300) to pay for them is essentially putting a price on some lives and not others.

You can’t have a housing market at the same time as eliminating homelessness, to take one example. Because if you give everyone a home, there’s no point in buying and selling homes and making a profit from it. If every human life is worth the same amount (as I believe), there’s no point to paying janitors less for their labor than programmers—or paying women and people of color much less than white men. It’s all a scam, a flim-flam, a shuck-and-jive, and I loathe it.

Onward To The Future

But that’s not the world in which I currently live, is it? While I can dream and work towards a better future, I need to pay attention to the real world. That’s where all this started. I can’t complain about right-wing pundits ignoring the effects of a policy that has been in place for decades, while also complaining that the world doesn’t conform to my moral views.

Minimum Wage is a compromise policy to me—a stepping stone along the path from pure capitalist-class economics towards a more human-centric and equitable society. If people can band together and push the minimum Wage higher, and get it implemented in more and more places, then the next step would be to pay everyone a minimum wage, regardless of their having a job or not. This idea is called Universal Basic Income (UBI), and it has been in place in some countries and regions. There are folks in the United States that are advocating for it, too. That would set the absolute lowest bar for any adult human being: you are worth at least this much. Ideally, it would pay enough that everyone could afford a place to live, food to eat, and healthcare; the base needs everyone shares.

The next step along that axis would be for the government or society to grant those basic needs, without requiring an income with which to pay it. It sounds looney-tunes, doesn’t it? And yet, that is the economic idea behind Star Trek’s utopian United Federation of Planets, the invisible background story on which the ideals of infinite diversity and radical equality were founded. Everyone had the freedom to do as they wished—everyone, raised by the richness of society above the base level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

That is my utopian dream. I’m well-read enough, however, to know that utopias rarely exist for long, if at all. But ain’t it pretty to think about?

The Planet It’s Farthest From

General

A year ago this weekend I moved into this apartment, a two-bedroom one-and-a-half bathroom townhouse located on the very eastern border of the city limits of Portland.

I originally moved in with my nephew, Max, which is why we chose a two-bedroom place. The price was OK for us, even if the location was a bit far away from our friends and family, for both of us.

That weekend was bittersweet for me; I can’t speak for how Max felt about it. I felt I had very little choice. Other townhouses in the same price range and closer in had turned us down—me for bad credit, Max for no credit. This was his first-ever apartment.

I’ll always be grateful for the help of my friends and my family; helping me out after I couldn’t afford the apartment I’d lived in for almost two decades, a victim of rents rising faster than income and my own prolonged unemployed and under-employed status.

But damn did I hate not being in Sellwood anymore.

Max and I called the new place The Treehouse, a reference to Finn and Jake’s Tree Castle from Adventure Time. And that winter was a fun and yet frustrating time. Fun because Max is a very good roommate, but frustrating because as the weather got colder, we discovered the heat did not work at all. We suffered through many a cold night, fighting with the strangely hands’ off management company trying to get it repaired.

My friends all joked that I lived in Gresham, which I laugh off but does sting a bit. I’m a native Portlander, and my current address is a Portland address. I vote in Portland city elections. I’m inside the border.

But only just inside.

Max spent most of November and December house-sitting for his parents and wasn’t around, and I felt a little lonely; far from my friends, no one else around to talk to or play video games with, dealing with the cold weather. They did finally repair the heater, and within a week or two the managers announced that the property had been sold to a different management company, which, in retrospect, explained some of the odd goings-on with repairs.

I felt more than a little anxiety as the year wound to a close because my work contract was ending at the end of the year, and I had begun looking for a new job. But at least I had a car that worked and a place to live and a roommate to split the costs with.

In December, Max announced that he was planning on going back to school and that he would be moving into a room in West Linn, to save money. He promised to help me out with a month or two of rent, knowing I was losing my income in January, which to his credit he did not have to do. I figured I could afford a month or two on unemployment but I had to push for a job as quickly as I could.

After he moved out I moved my bed into the bigger bedroom (he got the big bedroom and I got the single parking space; a fair split between us) and turned the smaller one into a computer room and office space. That reminded me of my two-bedroom in Sellwood. It’s nice to have the extra space.

I started my new job, at a moderately higher rate of pay, just two and a half months into the year. I hoped I could make enough to move back in closer to town, but the rise in pay was not quite enough for me to build up my savings.

Meanwhile, since it was only me in the townhouse, I began calling it Tattooine, because, if there’s a bright center to Portland, I was on the block that’s farthest from it. I nearly always have to go to my friends’ houses or neighborhoods; it rarely makes sense for them to come to mine. They have visited, from time to time, but normally… it’s just me.

I know many of my neighbors in this complex by face but not by name. Is that normal for Portland, though? This isn’t the South, where people introduce themselves and get involved. Portlanders are polite but stand-offish.

There is a very cute cat that I see sometimes. She is a grey and cream tortoiseshell color, and she is very sweet, and sometimes she tries to come in my apartment and I have to stop myself from letting her. I know she has an owner because she wears a collar, and they would miss her. Maybe I should get a cat for myself. My friends all think it would help me.

I’ve put up some art, but not everything. I have decorated a bit, but not as much as I could. In my mind, this is a temporary space. I want to move out—or, rather, move in, closer into the center of Portland, closer to my friends, possibly even back to Sellwood. My resistance is knowing I don’t have much savings, and that I have a bad rental history; I am suffering the consequences of my decisions, and it’s very easy to beat myself up with them.

But maybe with a year of good rental history, I can demonstrate I’m back on track. Tattooine can be a waypoint, one stop in my journey. For now, I’m just remembering a full year in this place.

This Might Be The Most Random Post

General

Look, we both know I just need to warm up and then I’ll find some groove and it’ll all make sense. Hang in there with me, because I do not know where this is going. As usual.

I watched a couple of videos about The Last of Us, Part 2. I’m super excited for this game. Max and I played the first one together. Well, actually, Max was playing it for the second time and I watched him play and helped with some of the major decision points.

The first game was brilliant: immersive, tense, and character-driven. Oh, and there were plenty of zombies to kill, too. The second game also seems very character-driven, but with a focus on Ellie, the young woman who had some kind of immunity to the zombie-fungus, rather than Joel, the laconic anti-hero father figure.

I’m a bit concerned that Ellie has a love interest and that the game is going to injure or kill the love interest in order to motivate Ellie. Why is that concerning? It’s because Ellie is a lesbian, and “Bury Your Gays” (warning: TV Tropes link, proceed with caution or else you’ll lose hours over there—come back as soon as you can) is a harmful trope in modern writing.

On the other hand, The Last of Us is set in a gloomy post-apocalypse, and those tend not to have happy endings. Any love interest is potential refrigerator fodder. So maybe it’s harder to avoid in this instance. Maybe there is a path through the game to a happy ending for Ellie and her love life. I’d like to think so.

I’m super full right now. I’ve been eating a lot and my weight has been trending up this week. Today I had my usual breakfast (oatmeal, bacon, coffee), plus a raspberry scone, plus a small deli sandwich, plus a gallon of coffee and cream, and then for dinner I stopped at the teriyaki place and got a giant plate of teriyaki chicken, two cups of white rice, and another gallon of teriyaki sauce. I ate it all, and now I can see my stomach bulging like some kind of big bulging thing.

And there’s a small part of me that wants to walk over to the Dairy Queen and get a Blizzard because some small part of me wants to be full all the time. I don’t know what pushes me to keep eating even when I’m stuffed full. There’s some psychology there that I do not fully understand. I can feel the Inner Negative Voice mumbling something… just can’t make it out clearly. But there’s some self-loathing involved because of course there is.

Speaking of video games, I really want to play this terrible goose game that everybody’s talking about. That’s all I have to say about that.

My site (this site!) gets more daily views when I post in the evening. Or did I already mention that? I’m not going to go check now. This is just more words towards my word count. Also… random!

I really hate living right across the street from a Dairy Queen, y’all. It’s bad for me to be able to just walk over there any time they’re open and buy a Blizzard (I never buy anything else, although I do sometimes only buy a mini one (~350 calories), sometimes a small (660 calories) and, rarely, a medium (800 calories or about 2/3s of my daily allowed calories)).

I’m happy that Spider-Man is back in the MCU although I bet that whole brouhaha between Sony and Marvel/Disney was just kayfabe.

I’m really running out of random things to type, so I think I’m just going to call it here. I wrote more than the minimum, it’s late on a Friday, and I’m tired. So tired I took a nap in my car at lunch, even though I don’t have a newborn to blame my sleepiness on. Let’s be real, I’m never going to have a newborn to blame anything on.

Good night, dear readers. I love you all.

OH! One more thing. I have not sent three pitch emails/letters out this week. I’m going to do one or two more this weekend. I have sent one pitch out to two different editors, though. Did I mention that already? Again, not going to go search back and see if I’ve posted that already.

For reals. Good night.

I Had Something For This

Daily Story Project

I had an idea for what I was going to write today but now, now that I’m home and sitting in front of my computer with nothing else pressing to do, I can’t remember what it was. You know the drill; I’m just going to keep typing until it comes to me or I get over my word limit.

Was it about work? No, it was not about work. That was not the subject about which earlier I said to myself “Self, this is what you should write about!” Work today was a bunch of little stuff: Outlook crashing, new users to set up, weird intermittent network issues that vanished as soon as I realized something was going on… Nothing pressing, no ongoing issues, no meaty technical problems I could research and then feel good about resolving. Just piddly little shit. Day went by fast, though, so that was good.

Was it traffic, or my commute? No, that wasn’t it. Although, now that I mention that, I have discovered an interesting new way drive. My commute is 30-40 minutes one way since I’m driving from far Southeast Portland to Canby, in the valley of the Willamette River.

Normally I take SE Division to I-205, then south on 205 to Oregon City, where I hop on 99E and ride that up the hill and along the river into downtown Canby. It’s just a series of boring straight shots, except for the pretty river view on that last bit. But even then, most times I use Google Maps during the drive to and from work; sometimes it directs me around big traffic jams, and, if nothing else, it gives me a readout that shows approximately when I will arrive at my destination.

Well, several times this week, in the morning, it told me to take backroads home and to work, and I let it. The route runs through farmland and past big brand-new housing developments, and then into the tiny little town of Carver, OR, on the upper Clackamas River, and includes a nice run past more farmlands along S. Clackamas River Drive into Oregon City. It’s very pretty, much more so than the view from the freeway, especially in the morning with some light fog.

I hadn’t been to Carver in many years, even though as the crow flies it’s not that far from where I normally go. My strongest memories of it are of it being a destination for weekend day trips as a kid, where the whole family would pile into the car and go out on the river. Dad would wander off to fish, my sister would play in the river or chat with her friends who tagged along, and I’d find a shady rock somewhere and read books and comic books. Carver was the town we’d buy soda pop and sugary treats and sandwich makings. That little store is still there, right by the bridge that crossed over the Clackamas River (though the bridge I remember has been replaced by a much sturdier concrete thing, rather than the wooden-railed one that may be a false memory).

But that wasn’t what I was going to write about. Just a happy coincidence that I have been routed through there this week, for some reason only The Algorithm knows.

Was it my poor sleeping patterns this week? No, not that. Last night I went straight to bed as soon as I got home, I was so tired. When I woke up it was after 10:30 PM, so I rose, nuked a burrito for dinner, watched some YouTube, and went back to bed around 1:30 AM. Not sure broken sleep like that is any better than whatever else I would have done, and tonight, again, I’m very tired. Maybe a bit rambly, too; have you noticed?

I feel like I was tired because I felt a serious but mostly-low-level anxiety all day. Tightness in the chest, dizzy, distracted, weird changes in appetite. Many (but not all, mind you) of the symptoms of a heart attack, which only increased my anxiety. But I’m pretty sure it was just anxiety. My stress was not helped by the ongoing political… spectacle? Yeah, that’s a good word. But the less said about that, the better. So I can state for certain that was not what I wanted to write about.

Maybe it’ll come to me again later, that nifty idea I had earlier. I have to remember to make a note of these things when they come up. It’ll help me in the long run. I would love to post some focused, tight, emotional writing here, rather than these stream-of-consciousness blatherings.

I do appreciate my readers, though. Thanks for sticking with me in these trying times.

Life’s A Pitch

Freelancing, Portfolio

Sheets of hand-written text lit by soft light through curtains. — Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay

I broke the seal. I’m now sending out pitches for articles to various editors.

In fact I’ve already gotten a rejection! Don’t be sad, that’s a good thing. Well, not as good as an acceptance but still, it means I’m out there trying. That’s why I’m saying I “broke the seal”—the scary part is over, and now I can just keep moving forward, by, presumably, coming up with more article ideas and sending them out to editors until they accept one or more of them.

The rejection I got yesterday was not my first rejection. Many years ago I took a writing class. It was a night class, not for college credit. Just something I took to dip my toe in the water and spend time around other people who like and want to write. And after we finished our first story, the instructor made us all submit it to an editor.

She made us all send it to Redbook, I believe. Is that magazine still around? The magazine published lots of freelance or reader submissions, on a wide variety of topics, including little memoir-type stories like we wrote for our first assignment in class.

Our chances of being rejected were quite high, she explained, but the whole point is to get our first actual rejection out of the way and behind us, to teach us it’s better to pitch and fail than just wonder.

I still have that letter, I think. It’s framed somewhere in a box, but I saved it. I wish I had a picture of it; I’d post it here, because I like to include pictures with my posts when I can. I’m funny that way.

As of right now (write now? sorry, couldn’t resist) I’ve got one idea that I’m shopping around to some local publications. I’m aiming high; it’s a big article idea and the outlets I’m sending it to are kind of a high bar to cross for someone with no real published articles to their name. But it’s a start. I have some smaller ideas I want to send out, and for those I will be aiming at various small online-only blogs and websites. But the idea I’m starting with is one I’m proudest of, and one that would be a lot of fun to write.

No, I’m not telling you what it is. You’ll have to wait.

This is what I have to do if I want to be published. This blog is a testament to my ability to write lots and lots of words, very good words, arranged well and communicating emotion and facts and character and plot… but that’s not the skill I need if I want my words to be accepted by editors and then printed elsewhere. I love you all, all 25-30 of you that are reading my posts these days, but I need to see if I have what it takes to get my words in front of a wider audience.

And to do that I have to send out pitches. I was talking to Terry last night and I was explaining the steps, and one of the things I mentioned was that it is considered a negative if a freelancer sends the same pitch to more than one editor at a time. Not supposed to flood the market, even though that would shorten the time it takes for a pitch to find a home. “I don’t know why that is, but that’s the case, and I’m going to follow the conventions because I’m trying to break in.”

Terry laughed at me. “You’re not selfish enough!” he said, and he’s right. I’m not selfish enough to try to break in by breaking the (unspoken but socially-accepted) rules. I want to do it the right way. I consider that my strength, not my weakness.

Honestly I already have the advantage of being a straight white cis male. It may seem like that advantage is evaporating these days, but it’s still there. I am OK if that’s seen in a less approving light these days; there are plenty of other voices out there that deserve the spotlight. People of color, women, gay and trans and queer voices. I’m happy they are getting more attention; it’s long since past time for them to talk about the world as they see it.

That being said, I know that I’m still going to have a small advantage due to the accident of my birth in a culture that leans in my direction—my privilege. So I am not going to press that advantage at all. I’ll keep my head down, follow the rules, just write as best as I can and send it out and see who bites.

Because I’m always going to write. That’s not going to stop. I’ve demonstrated I may slow down from time to time, but writing is still second nature to me. Writing is one thing. Writing for an audience is quite another skill, so I’m beginning to develop it. Stay tuned.

Famous To Myself

Daily Story Project

I’ve had a tiny increase in traffic over the weekend and it’s fun to think that there may be people out there reading my words who aren’t close friends or family. Not a lot of other people. Just a handful. But, y’know, still.

Have I written yet about the odd-but-nice encounter I had at Rose City Comic Con a weekend or two ago? I was standing in some booth on the show floor in my Vault Suit and I turned around and saw a guy looking at me. He was wearing a nifty N7 jacket and was probably 20 years younger than me.

He smiled and said, haltingly, “Luna Rob Verse? Is that you?”

I laughed and (hopefully) mildly corrected him (“Lunar Obverse”) and admitted that that name was mine, and he said, to my mild surprise, “I’ve been hoping to see you! My friend has been talking about whether or not we would see you here.”

It turns out he and his friend ran into Max and me last year. We had all been wearing Fallout-inspired costumes, that’s how we noticed each other. And Max and I had told them about our podcast, Uncasting. While Max and I had been blissfully unaware, these two guys had been listening to our podcast, and it stuck in their minds enough to wonder if we would cross paths again.

This is a tiny little glimpse of what it would be like to have a small bit of celebrity, and it was surprising and heartening. It made me feel good, and it also worried me, that I had done something wrong. Somehow. I don’t know, I just know that my positive voice and my Inner Negative Voice were in a battle. Luckily, as I may have covered earlier, that weekend my positive self mostly won. I enjoyed the moment, glad that some small bit of my creativity and effort had gone out into the world and been noticed.

I made sure to let Max know about the encounter, and it inspired us to produce more podcasts, once Max has returned from his sojourn in the arid deserts of Utah learning how to fly.

And then, this weekend, seeing the little graph of visits to my blog spike, I felt that glow of attention warm my heart once more. The blog stats include not just visits but which pages are getting views, and it showed a wide range of older posts and the home page. So I clicked through to see which posts they had landed on.

From there I fell down a memory hole. I’m not going to link the posts, but a bunch of them were from the very first year of my blog. I read about being on the bus and observing people around me; I read about yearning for a connection with someone else, especially a romantic connection; I read about being in dive bars and strip clubs and drinking and my friends drinking; I read little one-off jokes and about boring weekends where I did nothing at all but eat and run. I read about complaints about politics and complaints about my neighbors.

There was a consistent cast of characters: random unnamed customers for whom I did computer work; a shortlist of strippers I really really really liked, like Sharai and Áine and Stormy; folks in my neighborhood like the barista J., and my next-door neighbor Old Barfy, and the convenience store guy Dave; and my friends, Tracy, Ken, and Kevin; and a random assortment of fellow bus passengers or bar patrons.

People who did not regularly appear: women I was dating—for the most part, those women did not want to be immortalized in a podunk blog, but also, I didn’t start dating much until much later in my blog’s timeline.

There were many posts I did not remember writing at all. Once I read the post, I could vaguely recall the experience, but the memories and feelings of those events I had decided to document had fallen out of my brain; the only emotional connection I had was in the words on my screen. It was as close to an out-of-body experience as I have ever had. Yes, Brian had written those words, after living through those experiences; but that Brian was gone, had been gone for a really long time.

But by all that’s holy the way I had written those things were inspirational to me now. I had written those posts! Me! Imagine it! Those words had come out of my mind and through my fingers onto a screen. I nearly wept from the conception that I had once been capable of capturing the yearning, the joy, the reckless disregard I had for saving face or covering up my flaws. My flaws, my human nature, was all there on the screen for anyone to see.

I had written with the dream that someone, someday, would read what I had to say. But that had been followed by years of beating myself up with the club of believing no one had, and no one will, ever read them, only to wake up one day seeing a bar graph tell me that someone is out there.

And it all turns out (turns out!) that the most emotional impact my old posts would have is on me, years later, remembering the Brian-That-Was.

Hey, Past-Me. Thank you for the memories. I miss you, sometimes.

Podcasts Against Loneliness

General

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A post shared by Hannah Hillam (@hannahhillam) on Sep 17, 2019 at 2:11am PDT

I didn’t always listen to podcasts. I had to start at some point.

If you’re reading a blog, you probably already know what a podcast is. In case you don’t, the easiest explanation is that a podcast is like a radio show you’ve Tivo’ed. There are podcasts that cover just about any topic you can imagine, but the most popular ones are generally NPR shows, I think. I don’t know; I don’t listen to any of the most popular ones.

I believe the first podcast I ever downloaded and listened to was Yo, Is This Racist?, hosted by Andrew Ti and Tawny Newsome. I haven’t listened to it in a long time but the format when I did was the hosts reading a letter/email from a listener about a situation and then trying to parse whether or not it was racist. The episodes were short and to the point, the hosts were engaging and friendly, and I learned a lot from it.

That, however, was just the vanguard. Soon after that I began subscribing and listening to a lot of them. But why, though? Why did I switch from listening to music, to listening to people talking about various things? Wha hoppen?

I knew what podcasts were long before I listened to them. I participated as a behind-the-scenes volunteer for 30-Hour Day, a video podcast live-streaming charity benefit featuring hosts Cami Kaos and Rick Turoczy, back in—ohmygod—2009, ten years ago. That live stream stemmed from a podcast: Strange Love Live. I knew what it was, I participated in a small way, but I didn’t actually listen to it or follow it. It was just part of the tech underground.

I knew Dan Harmon, writer and creator of Community, did weekly shows in front of a live audience that were recorded and released as podcasts, called Harmontown. I knew that from reading about the scandalous things he would often say about making the show and working with Sony, NBC, and Chevy Chase. I read these things on the AV Club back in—ohmygod—2012. But I didn’t listen to the podcasts and I didn’t subscribe.

I could come up with more examples prior to me taking that final step of downloading and playing that first podcast. And if you’ve read the title, you might have a good guess as to what it was.

In February 2013 I left my job at Multnomah County for the vague sense that I should be writing. I spent most of my time at home, alone, staring at a computer screen, and some of that time writing. The times I wasn’t writing, I was procrastinating by surfing, doing minor housecleaning, exercising, or otherwise dicking around not writing. And, quite honestly, I was a bit lonely.

Sure it was my choice. Sure, I still had family and friends to talk to and hang out with. Sure, I made new friends online when I took up scraping nickels off the internet by being a worker for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and joining some forums to learn how to do it better. But there was still the vast stretches of time when I was home, alone, with only the voices in my head to keep me company… unless I downloaded some podcasts and played them and listened to these people talk about smart things and funny things and serious things.

It didn’t take very long before silence felt weird, and I was putting on podcasts to go about my daily chores as a habit. If I ran out of podcasts to listen to, I’d get agitated until I found a new one, or dug back into the archives to re-listen to an older one that I particularly liked. I’d binge the whole run of a podcast and marvel at how it changed over time—a huge undertaking for something that has been going on forever, like The Incomparable (a podcast for which I am a paying member, because of how much entertainment Jason Snell and his friends have given me over the years).

I now understand why some older folks would leave the teevee on in the background while they were home. Some friendly voices to fill the empty spaces in the house.

Now that I’m working on a regular day job again, I don’t feel that need to have podcasts going 24/7, though I do still listen to them when I’m at home. I also a bit of a commute—30-40 minutes one way—and that is prime podcast-listenin’ time. But I also mix it up with music sometimes.

And sometimes… even silence. I think I’m slightly less lonely these days. That’s a good thing.

Pokémon With People

fear

Of course, I’ve been on the various dating apps for a long time. Bumble, Tinder, and OK Cupid, primarily. I don’t know of many others. Match? Plenty of Fish (which I can’t help but see as “Plenty Offish” for reasons that should be obvious)? Hinge is a new one, too, but that requires far more interaction than I’m comfortable with. Actually commenting and sending a message with the first response? I’d much rather just swipe, right or left, yes or no, in or out.

Of the swipey-swipey apps, I call them “Pokémon with people”. When I have that hit of boredom that makes me want to get a quick hit of dopamine, I’ll open up the folder on my phone where I keep all the dating apps, and go through them, swiping until I’ve swiped everyone in my area that meets my requirements. I do it just to see a parade of faces and names and pithy descriptions. For a long time now, several years at the very least, I have done it with no expectations of matching with anyone. It’s just a simple game. The app developers have gamified dating and I am falling for the hook.

I don’t fall for it enough to pay money to increase my odds. Deep down, I don’t want to increase my odds of matching at all, if I’m honest with myself. Just the rare match is enough to keep me going.

Even when I do match, I rarely initiate conversation. I just keep swiping. That’s why it feels like an empty, pointless, game.

(There’s a word or phrase for that kind of game, right? The ones that just keep you coming back without any overall achievement? The Farmville kinds of games. Why am I blanking on that word? Maybe it’ll come to me if I keep typing.)

Swiping Left

I don’t think my requirements are very strict, so in theory, I should match with a lot of potential partners. Being 54 and male, I set the age range between 40 and 60, which, as I understand it, goes up much higher than other men my age. Of course, I could see myself dating a woman older than myself. There are plenty of women in my age bracket that I find attractive. The question in the back of my mind (oh, hello, Inner Negative Voice) is: would they find me attractive?

I have the usual dealbreakers, or what feels like a standard set. I swipe left (left is “No”, in case you didn’t know) on people who describe themselves as conservative. I’m very left-wing, politically, and I don’t think I would get much empathy or feel much connection with someone whose politics exclude all empathy and connection, which is what American conservatism is focused on these days.

I’m also not interested in folks who describe themselves as moderates, or, shudder, “apolitical”. That, to me, is just giving up, or giving aid to the conservatives. It’s not enough in our polarized times to claim neutrality against fascism, authoritarianism, or cults of personality; in my view, we need to stand against those ideologies. When I see “centrist” in a dating profile, I send them to the left. Best of luck but you are not for me.

Self-described Christians are also generally a turn-off. I’m an atheist, largely because American Christianity has become so strongly associated, politically, with conservative radicals, so I’m wary. I will, however, give more consideration to potential matches who claim liberal Christianity—though to be fair, those are few and far between.

One last dealbreaker for me, and it might be a touchy one. This is not meant as a judgment of someone’s character, it’s just that it’s not something I see myself as being capable of enjoying without a lot of angst and anxiety on my part. I swipe left if I see someone describe themselves as poly or in an “open” relationship. I understand that many people are communicative and honest and inclusive. I would love to be all of those things. In practice, I fear that I am not. I would have to have built up a level of trust with someone before I would be willing to try it, and the thought of starting off a relationship, even in the very beginning stages, while also including others I may or may not know about, is daunting in the extreme. So I decline to match with those folks. Maybe I could build up to it, approach it cautiously over time.

Whoops, We Matched?

All of this is rambling is because, for some magical reason, I currently have, not one, not two, but three matches in a couple of apps. I’m confused by this. I haven’t done anything differently. I haven’t really updated my profile, although I did add a couple of recent pics from last weekend from the comic convention—do I look happier in those pictures, and therefore might seem a better match?

Regardless, having three matches seems like an embarrassment of riches. How could it possibly be that there are three people out there who would want to talk to me, want to get to know me better, want to maybe meet up and share thoughts and all that? Not possible says my Inner Negative Voice. That can’t be right. It must be a mistake.

Do I find them attractive, my matches? Yes, I do. They’re all in my age range, they all seem politically left, they all have profiles with lots of words of description and thought put into them, indicating lively and creative minds. All these things are plusses. What do I do?

Well, if I had to tell a friend in this situation some advice, I’d say: just respond and see what happens. Try not to overthink it. Just go with it. I know you feel like matching is anxiety-inducing because you’re not used to it, and your self-esteem has been beaten down over the years, but communicating is not nearly as big a risk as your Inner Negative Voice is telling you. Just respond.

It’ll be OK, no matter what. It’ll be OK. You’re going to be OK.

Epiphany, Redux

General

As per usual, I’m sitting here in front of my computer with no idea what I’m going to write about. No title, no germ of an idea, nothing. I’ve been sipping coffee and scrolling through the Hellsite trying to find motivation or inspiration and nothing is coming to me.

But the whole point of my ongoing exercise is that I need to write no matter what. It’s not about “finding motivation” it’s about momentum and habit. Which is why I’m just typing this out instead of floundering around trying to scrape together some genius idea I can riff off of for 1000 words or so.

My apologies, as always, if you find your interest in reading this flagging. I just have to get something down on paper. Well, not paper, but pixels and electrons. Same thing, these days.

So… what’s on my mind? Oddly, it’s my old me.

For some reason, my blog software registered that someone was reading a very old post of mine, titled “Epiphany”, which, in my defense, I wrote over a decade ago (posted 18 September 2008); eleven years and 3 days ago as I write this. So, of course, I re-read it. And, wow, it’s a lot to take in.

The tone is entitled and bitter and angry. I’m basically tearing my friends a new one for them not treating me like I wanted to be treated. What an awful, dark mental place that was. I can remember writing that post, and the reactions of my friends to it, and having to defend what I wrote as “this is how I’m feeling lately”, but it was not a good take. I can’t imagine writing it today. Today I am grateful for my friends, and I appreciate them for sticking with me.

“Epiphany” reminds me of all the shit I’ve been through, and how I had to work very hard to keep it from turning me even more bitter. I had to express those feelings, get them down in words and sentences, translate the hurtful black clouds blocking my brain so that I could see and heal from whatever pain I had inside.

But out in the open, seeing something like this:

When I suggest, through indirect language and hints that probably only I can understand, how they can help me, they don’t hear me.

…I see the Inner Negative Voice being channeled and it makes me realize that that is what the voice says when I feel I’m a terrible friend. I see myself having en expectation (why don’t they hear me?) and a strategy (if I say it subtly will they notice?) and I’m creating a fucking test for people to pass or fail and then judging them when they don’t respond as I expect them to. It’s a horrible, transactional way to be.

The rest of the post goes on and seems a bit more reasonable. I try to make the case that everyone is doing the best they can with what they have, and that’s true, but I still come across as bitter about not getting my own needs met. How could I, though, if I wasn’t expressing them? I was hiding in a corner and hoping my friends would come and find me when they didn’t even know we were playing Hide And Go Seek.

Much better to come clean, to ask for what I want, and to accept whatever answer the universe gives me (and by “universe” I mean my friends and family, of course; the universe, my universe, personified in the form of real human people doing real human things with and without me).

Honestly, I’m still tired of going through the motions of my life, repeating the patterns. Anyone reading these posts should be able to see that. But I’m doing my best to break the patterns myself. And, again, honestly, I don’t even know what I would replace it with. What do I want? My therapist and my friends have asked me that in recent days, and I have no answer for them. Whatever epiphany I had, it did not reveal a new path. Just a rejection of the path I’ve had up to now.

My future is contingent on the choices I’ve already made, so it’s not like I can become someone completely different. I don’t want to stay here, though. I need to move forward.

Ugh. Movement. There’s a part of me that would much rather hide away than seek something new. Not sure if that’s the Inner Negative Voice or just the scared quiet child-Brian who was trying to protect himself in what felt like a random and dangerous world—the kid whose inaction and missteps created the Inner Negative Voice in the first place.

Maybe admitting I don’t know what I want is a good first step, though. Before I can move, I need to figure out where I’m headed. In the meantime, I can pay attention to where I am, and what I’m feeling, right now. That is enough.

For now, that is enough. Hello, and thank you for reading my confused thoughts. Happy Saturday.

Trying Not to Be Poor, Again

General

It feels later than it really is, but that’s because I’ve been awake since earlier than I normally am. It’s 10 PM, give or take, as I write this but it feels like it’s after midnight. Luckily for me and my self-imposed goal, it’s not after midnight because then, technically, I would be in violation, having not written 500-1000 words on Friday.

I’ve been awake since before my normal waking up time because, in one of my pre-alarm wake-ups, I rolled over, checked my phone, and for some reason checked my bank balance, only to discover it was much lower than it had been before I’d gone to sleep. I won’t give you the exact amount but it was enough to make me worry that I might not have enough cash to get me through until the next paycheck.

The shock of that was enough to kick off my anxiety, and I went through the transactions in my account trying to figure out what had come out that I had not expected. My last couple of months have been spent carefully trying to plan ahead and set aside the money I need for my bills, using what is basically the envelope method of budgeting: setting aside groups of money for utilities, rent, gasoline, and food. But nothing seemed out of place. The envelopes had the right amount of money for future bills, but the “safe-to-spend” was just… lower.

That anxiety kept me from just rolling over and going back to sleep, unfortunately, so eventually, I stood up and went about my otherwise normal routine. Once I was showered and had breakfast, I sat back down at my computer and went over my future budget. I will be OK, but it will be tighter than I had originally thought.

I hate the roller-coaster, the feast-or-famine, of my current financial situation. I mean, I haven’t overdrafted my account in several months, so that’s good: my bills all get paid and I’m not bleeding money. But I cut it pretty close. My bank balance the night before my last paycheck was a buck and change. I hate this so much but at least I’m doing better than last year, where I must have given my bank several hundred dollars I couldn’t otherwise spare in NSF fees.

I have gas in my car and food in my fridge and cupboards. My bills will get paid, and I’ll make it to work, and I’ll have food to eat. But anything extra is just going to have to wait. I have a roof over my head, the lights are on, and the internet is working enough for me to keep on typing and surfing and streaming.

What would life be like without the stress of micromanaging my money? I can’t remember ever not fussing over every penny. It’s a fantasy, much like delving deep into an underground tomb looking for magical items and shiny gold coins. Life is dreary at the base of Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs but someone’s got to be down here.

I told Terry I couldn’t make it to happy hour after work, and he offered to buy me a beer. I was honest and he was generous. I feel more than a small amount of guilt for that but I didn’t ask; he offered. I guess that’s what friends are for? I would do the same for him if our situations were reversed. I just can’t see it ever reversing. Life stretches on.

I only had one beer, plus a cheap happy-hour burger that was delicious (it had jalapenos!), and then Terry and I wandered into a conversation about life and capitalism and being driven to change things for the better (me) and feeling helpless to make any difference at all (him) and it was a good conversation about deep and important topics. We agreed to disagree, as we always do, even after the talk continued while we wandered the streets outside the bar and sat on a bench and watched cars drive too fast down a narrow crowded street while pedestrians drunkenly crisscrossed in and out of headlights.

We didn’t solve anything except cementing our positions as Luke Skywalker trying to take on the whole Empire himself (me) vs. Han Solo just trying to look out for himself and his crew and spend the reward he got for risking his life (him). It’s a tale as old as time.

One of the touchstones of our conversation is the idea that if we met now, while we were adults, we would probably not become friends. We have a lot of differences that would likely repel each other. But we’ve been through a lot, and we bonded when we were much younger and less set in our ways, and that friendship keeps us in each others’ orbits. Do you have friends like that? I hope you do, because it’s the best feeling.

Is it even possible to bond like that with someone anymore? I look at the world online and the people around me, and I don’t really think it’s possible. If it is at all, it’s incredibly rare. How would that even happen? Surely not through Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. Surely not.

At any rate, I am tired and there’s still plenty of writing to be done this weekend, so

good night.