Wacky Hijinks Ensue

After the movie, I had dinner at a local Wendy's. After I put down my food and went to go get napkins and a straw, this guy politely asked me if I could give him 40 cents so he could get a sandwich. I try to be a good person and I could afford it, so I gave the guy $5 and sat down to eat.

Now, the dining area was pretty empty, just me, the guy I'd given money to, this big guy sitting at a table in the middle of the floor and the workers going around cleaning up. Big Guy almost immediately starts "jokingly" needling the guy I'd given money to (let's just call him MG for short, shall we?) about what he was going to get to eat. I wasn't really paying attention because I didn't really care what he got; once I passed that money over, it was his to do with as he wished.

Well, MG stared at the menu board for a few minutes then walked out to who knows where. Big Guy then called over to me, tattling that MG hadn't bought any food with "my" money and then kinda snottily/condescendingly said "I bet he's just going to buy a bottle of wine with it anyway." To which I promptly replied, in a calm voice, "Well, I've been in positions like that before and if a bottle of wine will make his life better for a little, then more power to him."

Big Guy tried to get me to agree with his "righteous anger" towards "cheats", but I tuned him out as not worth my time, which pissed him off as best as I could tell from the glancing attention I paid to him. Apparently my lack of indignation and failure to rise to his bait REALLY pissed off Big Guy, because as soon as one of the Wendy's employees came within range (he couldn't be bothered to get up and go to the counter for this, you see), he proceeded to loudly vent onto her about having panhandlers in the store and that he was gonna call corporate about this and they would need to put metal detectors at the doors because the neighborhood was getting bad and blahblahthepoorsuck-cakes.

After he indignated his way out and the woman he'd vented at came by, I briefly commiserated with her about his assholishness.

Now, as an adjunct to that story, allow me to explain my take on people begging for money: I've been in that situation and almost let my pride kick me out on the street for not asking for help. I know what it's like to have $20 that you have to turn into a month's worth of food and running out before then. I know what it's like to have to do things that you abhor, that kill parts of you, to survive.

Now that I've clawed my way out of that hell and can afford to help other people still there, I'm going to. And so what if they buy booze or cigarettes or drugs with it? I would hope that they wouldn't, but if that's what they need to survive the grinding misery, then I'm okay with that.

And that attitude pisses off a lot of people who've never, ever had to face that kind of hopelessness. They see poverty and desperation as character flaws: moral weaknesses well-deserved by the unworthy whom God punishes. But those people (to be deliberately crude about it) can suck my shitty asshole. I doing what I can, no matter how minor, to improve someone's life and I don't give a flying fuck what Righteous Indignates think about it.

The GoArmy commercials really tend to bug me. Not because they're recruiting for the Army; I respect people who choose to join. What bugs me is the subtle message that NOT joining the Army means you're not a "real man" (it's always guys who join up in these commercials, you notice).

The first one shows this fresh-faced kid in his greens (not full formal, but more than everyday wear. I dunno what the outfit is called), probably right out-of-boot-camp sitting on a porch with his father. And dad looks over at son and tells him "When you got off that train, you did two things that you'd never done at the same time before. You shook my hand. And you looked me straight in the eye." So the implication is that sonny-boy wasn't a grown-up, wasn't an equal to his father until he joined the Army.

The other one that chafes my ass is the one where the (presumably high schooler) is trying to convince his dad to let him join the Army Reserve. His argument basically consists of "it's not the real Army, Dad! I won't get deployed unless we join an endless war that chews up troops and spits them out, creating an insatiable demand for more bodies!" And when dad finally caves a little and asks whether the training will be good, Son simply replies "It's the Army" with a "duh!" left unsaid at the end.

The one that really bothers me, though, is the one with the black kid and his mother. Basically, Kid is joining for the sign-on bonus and Mom is afraid for her son's safety. It's the most true-to-life of the 3 I mention here and sadder for it because, to me, it reveals the kind of financial desperation that enters (but not necessarily dominates) the decision that a lot of these kids make. A "real man" takes care of his family, after all.

Again, I have a great deal of respect for the men and women who choose to join the military and protect our country, but I find some of the advertising and recruitment methods that the military (the Army in particular) uses to be disturbing.

I loathe the smell of hotdogs.

My roommate seems to live almost exclusively off the damn things, and the smell that lingers for hours after he microwaves some makes me sick to my stomach. The stench of salt and preservatives and processed meat, all combined in a superheated column of wretched, contaminated air. I come home from work, hours after he's left for his job, and the odor hits my nose like a three-week-ripe dead herring jammed into my sinus cavities.

On the plus side, it's driven me off of most processed meat and I'm consequently eating more "straight from the animal" meats, more fruits and vegetables and less canned and microwavable goods. So, in an ass-backwards way, it's making me somewhat healthier.

But I still loathe the smell of hotdogs.

I just finished reading Digital Fortress by Dan Brown, the guy who wrote The Da Vinci Code. It's a thriller about the NSA, code-breaking and cypher analysis.

And I absolutely cannot believe how bad this book was.

One of the protagonists is a woman described as being a stunningly beautiful (of course) genius-level (170 IQ or so) programmer and code-breaker working for the NSA Cryptography Division and she has no idea what quis custodiet custodes meant until someone translated it for her ("Who watches/guards the watchers/guardians"), and even then she wasn't able to grasp the larger implications of the phrase. He boyfriend/fiancé regularly signs love-notes with the phrase "without wax" as a minor code-puzzle to tease her, and she can't figure out that it's a more-or-less literal translation of the roots of the word "sincere".

Of course, she's not the only one in Crypto with this stunning lack of knowledge or competence. People who should know better have to have the most basic code systems explained to them. A high-level functionary slash accountant has to have "divide-by-zero error" explained to him. Despite surreptitiously monitoring intel from around the globe, the NSA apparently doesn't have professional linguists on staff and must hire a local university poly-linguist (the aforementioned boyfriend/fiancé) on a case-by-case basis. This lack is most glaringly obvious when a cypheranalysis team trying to decrypt a Japanese communication are unaware that Kanji can represent individual words AND syllables in a larger word. They're trying to track down an anonymous someone via his email correspondence and don't think to try anagramming his short, letters-only address until it doesn't matter anymore. They're trying to crack the self-encryption of a purportedly unbreakable encoder that uses blah-blah-blah-impossiblecakes. They're given a clue to "use the prime difference between the elements of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" and can't figure out that it's referring to the fissionable material used in the bombs until they do a fucking internet search on it! And this clue was given by the disfigured child of a Nagasaki survivor! And said clue was found WITHIN the body of the supposedly still-encrypted program!

For fuck's sake! The director of the Cryptography Division, which works heavily with electronic intel and the various permutations of the internet, doesn't know what freakin' WORMS are!

Completely aside from the characterization flaws, which might barely be forgiven as exposition for the benefit of code-ignorant readers, it's badly written! Brown repetitiously reiterates the same point over and over again in an extremely short timespan, sometimes even repetitiously reiterating the exact same wording over and over again in a repetitiously reiterating manner. He randomly has page-and-a-half long chapters. Which don't even necessarily change perspective or time-frame. And could've easily been included in the previous chapter.

Basically, the characters were idiots when it came to their jobs, the book was badly written and I successfully predicted every single "twist" the instant it was hinted at. If The Da Vinci Code was half as bad, I cannot for the life of me figure out how it got to be such a best-seller.

I am a creature of habit. I make ruts in my life and happily settle into them. Routine is my friend. And when I'm rattled out of my ruts by outside forces, I settle things down as quickly as I can.

Of course, this also means that it's very hard for me do break out of bad behaviors or situations, or to find my way to new or better habits. It's a strong reason for why I have difficulty meeting people; the prime prerequisite is going out to new places and trying new things.

...Actually, no, I need to correct that last statement. I don't have difficulty meeting people; I have difficulty talking to new people that I'm physically attracted to. I'm awkward in new situations, which when combined with being nervous around a hot guy, makes me not want to even try. Lost cause and all that. Oddly enough, I think that's part of the reason why I had such a good time at TBRU: I was with a group of people that I had known online for a while, so I had someplace to which I could retreat (metaphorical, people) so that I wasn't overwhelmed by all the new people.

Ungh. I don't know where I'm going with this, or even if I'm going anywhere.

I've been doing some thinking about birthdays and age recently. My birthday is in 2 weeks, but I keep forgetting this. Not in a "what day is it again?" or "I don't want to think about it" way, but because age isn't really that important to me. Don't get me wrong, I like having a day to celebrate me, but the actual commemoration of the anniversary of my birth doesn't mean much to me.

This all came about when I went through my FList and put all the listed birthdays onto a reminder calendar and realized that most, if not all, of you are a much different age than I expected. Of course, this probably has something to do with the fact that I tend to think of people as being around my own age, yet I don't feel any particular age myself and have to take a second to remember exactly how old I am. Yes, I'm weird.

I suppose another part of it is that, in my mind, your "age" can refer to two separate things: your physical age (pretty self-explanatory) or your mental age (maturity level). I tend to gauge people's ages by their maturity rather than their chronological age and most of the people I know and like to interact with have a maturity level similar to myself.

Aaaaaanyway, if any of you reading this would like me to acknowledge your birthday, either here or by birthday card, leave a comment with the pertinent info. (nytemarewulf, please let me know your address) Comments will be screened, of course.

I have Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on in the background (damn you, trollprincess! Damn you for addicting me!) and while I think that they're doing wonderful things for these two families, I find the shock that the cast/staff is displaying to be mildly offensive. Every week, they help families that are only marginally better off than these two families. In fact, the only thing qualitatively different is that they don't have to demolish a house before beginning. I especially find ABC's gimmick advertising of the episode as "OMGHomelessness!!" to be very bothersome. Again, what they're doing for these families is wonderful, but how the situation is being presented bothers me.

Aside from the approximately 3 million homeless in this country (of whom about 20% are working) there are an additional 5 million who spend more than half their income on housing, which means that virtually any unexpected monetary setback can easily push them into homelessness. Thankfully, there are organizations such as Habitat for Humanity that help these working homeless construct and own their own houses. I've helped to raise money for HoH, and both of my sisters and my mother have donated time and labor.

Luckily, although I'm poor, I'm not that bad off. Close, but not quite. But I am distinctly and constantly aware of how easy it would be for me to end up with nothing. And especially in this economic depression "jobless recovery", I don't understand how people aren't aware of just how tenuous the positions of literally millions of people are.