Campfyre Stories

I know about liars. I’ve known quite a few of them in my life and grew up with 2. My dad was a liar like Calvin’s Dad. I think he did it in part because he didn’t want to admit to not knowing things, but I think he also had a lot of fun making people believe far-fetched things as well as convincing them that he was telling the truth.  My brother was more habitual of a liar.  He did it to get himself out of trouble, get others into trouble, to break the monotony, for a number of reasons.  Through both of them I learned to pick up on the signals that indicate that maybe you don’t want to take certain things or certain people at face value.  I’m pretty good at spotting a liar now and seeing the signs that someone is trying to…  to put it nicely, "trick me."

His name was Shawn, or so he said. It started off standard. I paid him a compliment, he returned one to me and we started chatting on the ride home. He asked what I do and asked a few follow up questions, but when I asked what he did, this man not much older than me, that was when I knew.

"So, what do you do?"

"I’m retired."

 *raised eyebrow* "Really."

 "Yeah. From the military."

"Oh, right on. What branch?"

 "All of them. I’m really not allowed to talk about it."

Oooooo-kay. I’ve known people in the military who weren’t allowed to talk about it. Never before have I met someone who was retired from all the branches, but why push it?  (Part of me wondered if he actually knew what the branches of the military were…  a better lie would have been to pick any one of them.) The conversation went on and Shawn told me fish tales and far-fetched stories. When I told him about my extensive childhood travels, he told me about his forays from Miami to Montreal with this girl… "Damn, what was her name again? I forgot." There was no harm in it, but I couldn’t really take him seriously at all.

I didn’t get the impression that he was trying to impress me, it seemed more of an escapist tendency than anything else. He talked about things he knew nothing about. Things that were glaringly obvious to me because of the simple fact that I do know about them. He spoke like he thought his business acumen was top-notch, when really it was silly and ignorant. People like that tend to not like me very much, since if I do know about the topic at hand, I will speak to it. Correctly.  In my experience, when you can accurately counter a calculated lie and do it with the innocence of factual knowledge, it shakes the foundations that liars build upon.

At the end of my ride I asked him where he was going and his answer was "I just like to ride around sometimes, see what kind of stores are around, you know?" It’s a cute idea, but I’ve seen him on this route before… I doubt very much that anyone can ride around to "see what’s out there" as many times as I know he has.

It was an interesting distraction, though, but it left me a little dissatisfied.  I wished (like I had before with other people) that I had a way to tell him that he could be so much more interesting if he just told the truth.  Evasive, hole-filled lies don’t satisfy very many people and those who buy into it generally are too easy to trick.  There’s no skill to it.  Even if his personal truth is boring, at least his lies could be better…  more believable, or LESS believable, even.  Sometimes, if you take it to the full extreme of unbelievability it’s easier to swallow.  Gods know that my life has been a series of stories that are incredibly hard to believe… 

In my imagination, I have come up with several different stories, some sad, some boring, that could easily fit Shawn and explain his reluctance to speak honestly about himself or even to portray himself reasonably, but those are just my own stories.  I can’t put them on him.

It almost made me sad, to see as practiced a liar as he fail so fully at the grace of it.  It is a skill, and a useful one if you can pull it off, but not everyone who tries succeeds.

Then again, maybe I’m just better at spotting them or more apt to notice.  I did, after all, grow up with two masters of the untruth.

Of all the people I know who are sick, no one has the thing I have.

Call me Typhoid Mary.  Of course, I’ll be blamed by some regardless of what the next sick to makes it’s rounds is.

I was coughing so hard that I couldn’t stop long enough to call in and had to send an email.  I sneezed so hard, I split my lip.  In two places.  On the inside of my lip.  I feel like I’m medicated, but I haven’t taken any medication.

Today I am functional after 4-5 days of being…  well…  NOT.

But the worst part is that I missed two days of work and when I got back, I still don’t have enough work to keep me busy.  Go figure.

I think that the internet brings out the worst in people. I know that it often brings out the worst in me. It must have something to do with the anonymity, but also with he desire to recreate ourselves. It brings out stupidity, rage, vengefulness, malice… quite a range of negatives in people, but no matter how we attempt to portray ourselves accurately, we inevitably fail.

I am a peacemaker in my real life. Conflict makes me tense and I’m constantly trying to find the middle ground. However, I am a troll on the internet. A well-spoken, subtle troll, but a troll nonetheless. I actively seek to pick fights and to piss people off – especially when I deem them (or, rather, their personas) as stupid.

I have a friend who is a very nice person 95% of the time, but not only is she an asshole on the ‘net, she even started a club for (internet) assholes. People who don’t know her IRL are shocked at how non-confrontational, generous and kind she turns out to be.

I think there’s some measure of self-preservation in it. We don’t want to expose our tenderness to people we don’t know. You have to have a thick skin and, at the very least, pretend that you don’t care. I pick fights online on a regular basis. I take pride in the ability to escalate a situation into something more interesting to read/watch and I do it pretty well. I write eloquently and choose my words carefully, putting barbs into the undertones. Trolling, when done well, leaves a lot of the responsibility on the person reading *into* your words. There is deniability that exists in the "but all I said was…"

This is why I stopped participating on message boards. I started to feel like I was becoming more bitter and angry off of them and that I was starting to take things a little too seriously. It wasn’t really an addiction, but the results to my personality were similar. But, when I think about it, I don’t think that I’ll ever fully stop. I just enjoy taunting the internet monkeys and wielding the power to rile people up a little too much

On some level, at least, I think I’m still trying to recover from this past weekend. Sleep deprivation is hard to get past, but I think that all the other stuff that has been weighing on me is also coming up at night.

I couldn’t get to or stay asleep last night. I read something recently about sleep deprivation that said if you can’t fall asleep in 30 minutes to get up and do something relaxing so you’re not stressing about not sleeping. That totally didn’t work.

I started writing a new song, but that, in and of itself kept me up even later as the tune ran through my head and the words tried to fall into place. Though it’s all written down, none of it would stay on the paper.

I also woke up every 45 minutes or so. Wednesdays are hard for me anyway, but without having hit REM, I find it especially difficult.

I’m tired. Not just from today, but the entire month is taking its toll. Also, I don’t know if it’s the time of year or some other factor, but I’m antsy and feeling the need to get outta Dodge. I’m working on that piece.

I really dislike sleepiing on the bus, but when you can barely keep your eyes open and there’s more than a half-hour to go, what other options present?

ZzZzZz…

I’m in a rut. 

Well, that’s not quite accurate, but to be entirely accurate, I wouldn’t be comfortable putting these thoughts out there, so we’ll go with rut for the moment.

I’m dissatisfied with the way life is going on several different levels.  I’m coming to realizations that I don’t know how to handle/tackle/change and I’m just in generally not particularly pleased with the way things are right now.

I keep feeling like life is trying to tell me that major changes are needed, but I don’t see how I can make those changes right now.  There are so many stumbling blocks that I can’t seem to get around.  I’m starting to take a closer look at what I have and where I am and I’m realizing that I don’t actually want what I thought I did.  And maybe I don’t know what exactly I want, but I think I can’t find it here.

It’s situational, mostly, but also partly to do with location.  I can look at and pinpoint the things that are good, but when I start making the list of things that are maybe not-so-good, it becomes overwhelming in a very short period of time.

I feel like I’m missing something, but I don’t know what it is.  I also feel like whatever thing I’m missing is right in front of me, I just can’t see it or haven’t identified it yet.  I’m not yet sure what to do with this feeling other than to try to tackle it head on.

Girl says that this is just a culmination of the *highly eventful* year that I have had.  I don’t know if I agree with that or not, since I’ve been dealing with each of the traumas pretty much head-on and muddling my way through them, rather than ignoring them or suppressing what comes about because of them.  Regardless, the dissatisfaction is strong these days, and on so many different levels.

I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do, but I feel a burning urge to do SOMETHING.  There has to be a way to get out of this moment and find some way to satisfy any of the lacking cravings that I’m going through.  It’s simply a matter of figuring out the "how".

Well, my girls were supposed to come up, but bagged because of the weather.  Spawn made an interesting observation that both of our snowstorms this year have been on (pseudo) holidays, so that’s kind of notworthy, though I could certainly go through the full month of April without having to do this again.

So, I’m not a big drinker and I never have been.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ll go out with the boys (since amazingly few of my girls ever drink) and toss ’em back with the best of them.  I’ll let my hair down and cut loose, no problem, but I don’t do it very often by any stretch of the imagination.

But I am a woman of extremes.  I just don’t do things halfway.  I knew what the party was going to be and knew I would have a good time.  What I didn’t know was that afterward we would be going to a bar.  But, still looking for a good time, I wasn’t going to argue or even not go.

Being a woman of extremes, though, even though I intended to leave earlier than the rest of them, I somewhow found myself wandering back into the bar and staying with those leftover and not finished partying until whatever time they pretty much threw us out of the bar.  Probably it would have been around 4.  Maybe a little later.

I’m a lucky one, though.  Despite (or perhaps because of) rarely drinking, I don’t really get hangovers.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a few and they were horrible, but for the most part I don’t let myself dehydrate and I almost always know ahead of time if I’m going to, so I can eat well enough to absorb most of the negatives.  I can also make sure I have the food in the house that I’m going to crave the next day.  I was useless, but not hungover, and I was capable enough to make dinner, which is more than I expected.

Sunday I mostly dozed all day, drinking lots of water and juice and generally not doing much else.

Ok, so, first off, YAY!  I have a new Daisy (v3).  They upgraded me and the interface is just enough different to be annoying.  I assume it will be (slightly) less annoying once I actually am able to sync everything up.

I learned that I only know two phone numbers of people I actually talk to.  Everyone else is either a designated keyboard (LOVE the QWERTY layout) or in the contacts folder.  i do, however, know the phone numbers of quite a few businesses.  Go figure.  I guess I dial businesses and am more likely to store those numbers.

Sprint’s phones in their stores haven’t been reset for Daylight Savings Time, so the automated system catches all the calls saying "This store is closed" for the first hour they are open.  I find it really surprising that I’m the first one to actually mention it to them, but apparently so.

Now all that’s left to truly getting my feet back on the surface of the planet is to Hot Sync and customize the phone with a couple of (tasteful?) stickers.  heh.

With Daisy out of commission, how could I expect anything less than extremely interesting days?  I can’t call anyone to share, I can’t take photos, I can’t DO anything but watch and share later on.

Yesterday was beautiful, so I decided to walk to the bus stop.  It was uneventful and thankfully the sidewalks were all clear.  The snow is melting, but not in such a way that I, as a pedestrian, am plagued by puddles, it was a nice walk.

When I got down to the bus stop, it was CHAOS.  There were 3-4 lit up police cars blocking half the road (a pretty major road, too).  In addition, there were what appeared to be several other official-looking vehicles.  Well, no, they were regular vehicles, but the people in them were very official-looking guys.  There was also a large mob of people actually waiting for the bus (but also, let’s be honest, watching the proceedings with interest).

Well I don’t know any of the details, but they were arresting a LARGE group of people (10+) and talking to quite a few others.  No one told us to leave the bus stop, so no one actually did.

Eventually the Transport Authority supervisor showed up and herded all the waiting passengers to the far side of the bus stop area.  She directed traffic and people so that getting on the buses would run as smooth as possible.  Not that anyone was really paying very much attention to her.  Frankly, she was nowhere near as interesting as the flashing lights.  I really wanted to take a picture.

My friend The Gamer Girl is coming up to visit this weekend.  She complained to me yesterday that my not having a phone was HIGHLY inconvenient for her…  you know, because it’s so very convenient for me :-P  She also decided to ask me if I had anything green to wear for St. Paddy’s day.  The thing for me, though, is that in order for my last name to be any more Irish than it already is, it would have to start with Mc or O’.  I’m really looking forward to her visit, but not nearly as much as I am looking forward to partying with her – finally.

Speaking of St. Paddy’s… 

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I’ve been busy lately.  This month, in fact, there are so many goings-on that I finally dusted off Daisy’s calendar and used it.  Looking at the sheer amount of commitments I have stressed me out.

But the busier I get, the busier I become.  The more plans I make, the less often I’m home, the more often my phone rings.  Probably this is due to people confirming and cementing plans, but it’s still rather annoying.

So, yeah, apparently, my "Midas touch" hasn’t gone away, although I am EXCEEDINGLY CAREFUL about not using the word "wish", but still complaining about things and wanting, for example, people to stop calling me while I’m in the bathtub.  Frankly, it is hazardous for me to do anything in that bathtub except soak.

Anyway, here’s the latest installment in the continuing saga of Daisy:

All of a sudden, while I was trying to text someone because my mother was on the radio yesterday, I dropped the phone on the flagstone floor in my kitchen and, thus, completely lost the display on my phone.  This was not really a crisis, per se, since I could still make and receive calls, but I couldn’t do anything else with the Treo.  No contacts, no email, no web browsing, no games, no text messages, no calendar, no touchscreen, no nothing…  but still a phone.

So I call Technical Support.  They are not helpful.  We’ll leave it at that.  Frankly, Tech Support is never helpful to me.

So I back up my data and sync up my phone.  I try to dismantle the phone, but I can’t figure out how and so only accomplish taking all the screws out, then putting them all back in.  Heh.  This is probably a really good thing, because at this point I am freaking out and screaming and yelling and cursing a blue streak.  (If you look really close, you can still see the blue streak hovering above my roof.)

The thing is, that the thing I did next is one of those "Did you try this" questions that they ask.  I lied and told them I had.  I knew, I knew that I shouldn’t do it, but I was at the end of my rope and had tried everything else.  So I did a hard reset and I wiped everything out.

And then I remembered.

Before you can turn your phone on after a hard reset, you have to align the touchscreen.  In order to align the touchscreen, you have to be able to see the targets.

No phone.

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I found it passingly notable when I briefly encountered a deaf man while ordering breakfast Tuesday morning, but nothing extraordinary.  I found it much more odd when that afternoon a deaf couple sat on the bus in front of me.

I’m a people watcher, especially when I have nothing else to do.  Sitting on the bus, listening to music is a good time to just watch people – usually with them somewhat muted.  Watching the couple in front of me was absolutely fascinating.

The woman was very jovial (for lack of a better word).  She laughed a LOT, but she never made a sound.  You could see it in her face and her shoulders, even when she threw her head back as she shuddered, but not a sound came from her laughter.  In some ways that made it even more poignant.

Everything these two people did were things that I had been annoyed with in others…  the cell phones, the raucous conversation, but without any sound at all, instead of being invasive, it was like watching a dance.  The fingers flying through the stories and debates, the searing focus they had on each other so they would catch the entire conversation.  They were in their own little world and they seemed perfectly happy to be so.

But they weren’t removed from the outside world, either.  They had brief, wordless conversations with others on the bus.  The woman who had four (!) children with her probably had more trouble working within a deaf conversation than the people who initiated it.  When your entire relationship with society as a whole relies on body language and enunciation (provided you can read lips), I wonder how that changes or alters a person’s willingness to spark a conversation with a complete stranger.  At a guess, I’d almost think that you’d have an easier time knowing who would be receptive to that sort of thing.

I know *very little* ASL.  I know the alphabet and a song.  This isn’t going to get me very far, but in an emergency, I can s-p-e-l-l o-u-t all the words I need to say.  It meant, though, that watching this couple converse was not eavesdropping.  I couldn’t understand anything they were saying, but I really enjoying watching the way their hands moved.  It was like listening to a foreign language…  only with my eyes instead of my ears.

Anyway, I found it interesting, especially since my day started with an encounter with a deaf person, and then ended with another two…