The Kiser Speaks

I have finally figured out why Texans are such magnanimous people. They will go out of their way to help a stranger. They do it because that stranger might become a friend and, as we all know, a friend is so much easier to take advantage of. Oh, they don’t necessarily have something in mind but they a wise enough to know that you never know when a particular friendship might be of use. Or which ones are stupid enough to let you use them again and again.

Oh, they’re good at it. They even convince you that they are doing you a favor by letting you help them. They are VERY good at that.

So, they make friends and make them feel welcomed and keep them on a string because you never know when they might be able to make use of them. They problem comes when that friend realizes that they are in a position to be of help but it means actually doing something that is of no value to them. When that happens they can’t believe their friends would even consider asking for help. Who do you think you are? After all you have done for them, they have done for you how could expect that kind of help from them.

You would think that after 18 years down here I would welcome returning to New England where people’s two-faced, what have you done for me attitude is right out there for the whole world to see. (It’s one of the reasons I needed to get out there.) The truth is that the cold, dank autumns and springs and the bone-chilling winters are more than I can stand anymore.

If you bothered to read this far then your head is probably reeling from trying to figure out who each “you” and “they” refers to in my tirade. I know mine is. I usually try to be more coherent. I have, in the past, rewritten pages trying to clear things up but tonight I just don’t give a damn.

Well, I have caught up on all my blog reading. No I didn’t read every post. I just scanned the titles and based on those, and my opinion of the blogger, I read the ones I thought would be interesting.

One of my favorites had a post from an online thing she tried that is supposed explain the hidden meaning behind you name.

I was pleasantly surprised with what I got so I thought I would share it. (Along with my rebuttal.)

You are fair, honest, and logical. You are a natural leader, and people respect you.

I have been telling people this for years.

You never give up, and you will succeed… even if it takes you a hundred tries.
You are rational enough to see every part of a problem. You are great at giving other people advice.

I do give up, but that came with age to minimize my frustrations. I do give advice whether asked for it or not.

You tend to be pretty tightly wound. It’s easy to get you excited… which can be a good or bad thing.

No comment.

You have a lot of enthusiasm, but it fades rather quickly. You don’t stick with any one thing for very long.

Probably why this blog and my job hunting suffer so much.

You have the drive to accomplish a lot in a short amount of time. Your biggest problem is making sure you finish the projects you start.

No comment.

You are confident, self assured, and capable. You are not easily intimidated.

Which surprises people. I am physically small and in a wheelchair so they figure I’m a push-over.

You master any and all skills easily. You don’t have to work hard for what you want.

I do get things quickly. Every programming language I have ever used I self-taught in about two weeks. I learn more with experience but I can work in it successfully at that point. There is a proviso and that is the availability of good reference material. I have taken courses just so I can get the references and handouts.

You make your life out to be exactly how you want it. And you’ll knock down anyone who gets in your way!

In a sense I do but lack of completing tasks tends to torpedo me.

You are a seeker of knowledge, and you have learned many things in your life.
You are also a keeper of knowledge - meaning you don’t spill secrets or spread gossip.

That is why the intenet is so addictive to me. I can gather information constantly. I do gossip but I make it clear that I am unsure of the truth of what I am saying.

People sometimes think you’re snobby or aloof, but you’re just too deep in thought to pay attention to them.

Sometimes it is easier to ignore morons than it is to correct them.

You are the total package - suave, sexy, smart, and strong.

Now this one made me laugh. The third one: OK. The last one: If you are talking emotionally and intellectually. The first two: I don’t even pretend to be that in my dreams.

You have the whole world under your spell, and you can influence almost everyone you know.

No comment.

You don’t always resist your urges to crush the weak. Just remember, they don’t have as much going for them as you do.

I am better at resisting this than I used to be. Only if I find someone who might be a challenge. Or if they really piss me off.

You are friendly, charming, and warm. You get along with almost everyone.

I try.

You work hard not to rock the boat. Your easy going attitude brings people together.

I have some former managers and co-workers that would disagree with the first part. Sometimes rocking the boat is the only way to put it in motion.

At times, you can be a little flaky and irresponsible. But for the important things, you pull it together.

No comment.

You are wild, crazy, and a huge rebel. You’re always up to something. You have a ton of energy, and most people can’t handle you. You’re very intense.
You definitely are a handful, and you’re likely to get in trouble. But your kind of trouble is a lot of fun.

Age and lack of funds has tempered this but I still try when the opportunity presents itself.

Check this out and see how accurate it is for you. If it is on the mark and you would rather not admit it, you’re the only who will see it.

I’m not sure I ever had or still have any readers but if you kept me in your blogroll then thank you.

I suffer from clinical depression. Normally my “happy pills” keep me going and make it possible to ignore the abyss. About the middle of January something sucked me in to the black hole. I knew I had to crawl out like always do and I put my mind to work on it. I was already scheduled for my semiannual meeting with my dealer doctor to renew my prescriptions at the end of January and by that time I had gotten myself past the event horizon but he bumped up one of my addictions prescriptions anyway.

When I came out of this one I had been playing an on-line strategy game called Pox Nora. (You will be hearing more about it from me since it is my latest on-line game addiction.) As I started to see the light again I was getting all these programming ideas and a strong urge to be techie again. I ended up improving my knowledge of PHP and finally looking up AJAX and finding out what it was. In one sense it is nothing but a method combing HTML, Javascript, and some real programming language to do simple things to a web page and make them look like you put in a lot of hard work. I finally got that urge under control. I don’t want to lose it though. It is what I am best at and it is time for me to get back to it.

When this started I just kind of disappeared from the blogisphere. Not just writing here but I stopped reading blogs and commenting on some that I commented on regularly, usually multiple times a day. I fed my morbid curiosity by reading Post Secret regularly so every time I started up my blog reader I saw how may posts behind I was getting. I started to rectify this at one point and I started marking some blogs all read, but only the ones I read for voyeurism.

Getting back into the ones I care about has the same problem that has cost me most of my real world friends. When I get gloomy I also get very grumpy. I know this and try to avoid any contact with people so I don’t say or do something I will eventually regret. Unfortunately that tends to put off people and you have to rebuild the friendships when your sanity returns. I have not had a great deal of luck with that part so I didn’t want to start reading and commenting (not commenting is never an option) because I would feel like I had to apologize for my sudden disappearance. So I kept putting it off. Well, now I think I am ready. I am hoping that this entry will suffice to explain to any one who asks.

Now I have to go read well over a thousand posts and try not to comment as if I was reading them shortly after they were written and everybody else was commenting. (Revenge may be best when served cold but sarcasm tends to turn mean with time.) I always feel a little cheesy when I try to reconnect with real world friends and I find I am having the same trepidations about reconnecting with my cyberfriends.

Okay, I have my excuse (this post) ready to point people to if they ask so I am going to fire up Bloglines and spend a day or more trying to catch up. I am confident that it will give me some ideas for posts so I will be posting more. I have also decided I have to stop hiding my techie side so as I do more programming I’ll be discussing it more so some people may get bored. But since I can’t control who reads it, then tough.

I spent New Year’s Eve alone. Now, that is neither unusual nor is it necessarily bad. Brother John wanted to go up the street to a friend’s house where they would be setting off fireworks. I am not a fan of fireworks and since he and I spend 24/7 together, it was a bit of a break for both of us.

We ate dinner early, around 5:30-6:00, and then I asked him to pour me a Jameson’s Irish whiskey on the rocks, my favorite adult beverage. I noticed that Men in Black II was on TV and I don’t remember ever seeing it. He went in his bedroom to watch the Houston Rockets game and I stayed in our family room/great room/”the only room in the house” and watched the movie. This was unusual because I spend most evenings here in my office only going out to take a drink of my ice tea. (I’m not the most graceful person so having liquids near my keyboard is a bad idea.)

I watched the movie. (I’m pretty sure I would have remembered that shot of Lara Flynn Boyle walking away from the camera wearing only lingerie.) Sipped on my drink and pretty much enjoyed myself. Somewhere around 9:00 Brother John came out to get ready to go outside. Before he left I asked him to fix me another drink. Since “the bottle was almost empty” I got somewhere between a double and a triple. I think he was hoping that would keep me from having to call him back for a refill. I also had him pour me a glass of ice tea for after I finished the drink.

Now, I was sitting there vacillating between being glad to have an evening to myself and pissed at being left home alone. (I don’t drink very often, that bottle was bought in November of 2006, which is also when I bought my last lottery ticket, so it was getting to me a little.) I suddenly had the thought that I wanted a cigar, something else I do very seldom. So he found one that was still sealed and not as hard as a rock, he trimmed it for me and lit it. Then he left.

I continued watching TV and smoking my cigar and sipping my drink and enjoying my pseudo-masculinity. Since it takes me two hands to pick up a glass I had to put the cigar down occasionally and about half-way done it went out. I just shrugged my shoulders and continued sipping thinking it was nice while it lasted. I thought about calling him to come back and re-light it but that felt selfish.

I have smoked, at various times, cigarettes, a pipe, and cigars and the only way I could light them is with wooden kitchen matches. Matches don’t last in this house because Brother John’s lighters run out and then the matches run out. So I just went back to my boob-tube. (I don’t get the Playboy Channel or Showtime so that is the “intellectual” use of the term.)

At some point one of Brother John’s friends knocked on the door and then came in, which is normal. I told him where Brother John was and then asked if he had a lighter. He didn’t but he offered to send Brother John over to light it and that didn’t seem as selfish because someone else was asking him to do it. So I was able to finish my cigar and my drink and feel good about not spending my evening here at the computer.

Well, when the booze and tobacco were gone I became bored with TV. I put it on one of those “CD channels” that had holiday music and came in to the computer. I’m not sure what all I did. I know I checked out the Pox Nora game site but I don’t have any games listed for that time, so I didn’t indulge that addiction. I may have read some blogs, but at some point I came up with a great idea for a post. The rest of the evening I was composing it in my head and laughing at the witty and sarcastic things I would say. I felt real good. I had a good idea for the blog.

Around 1:30 a.m., I hadn’t heard any fireworks going off for about an hour, I called Brother John to come home. He came home and we went through our nightly ritual of turning things off and getting me in to bed. I fell asleep pleased with my evening and I even had a blog entry that had pretty much written itself: In my head.

The next morning, barely since it was about 11:00 a.m. when we got up, there were two things I was absolutely sure of: 1) I had had a great idea for a post; and 2) I had not the faintest idea what it was about.

I spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday trying to get an inkling of what it was. I am pretty sure it was something that only sounded great to me because of the Jameson’s but I never got close. As I was writing this I thought maybe it was this post: How I spent New Year’s Eve. It might have been but I’ll probably never know for sure. **sigh**

Right now I have ideas for two more posts.  Now if I can just get them done before I forget what they are.

Just after Christmas I accepted a paid blogging assignment to extol the virtue of motorized bicycles. I had planned on writing what I thought would be a witty post about needing a new powered wheelchair and not being able to afford one so maybe I should buy an engine for a motorized bicycle and put it on a cheap wheelchair.

But I had to take moment and reflect after reading a post in Electric Venom about how lame a post like that could be. I had to decide if my writing was worthy of a blog where advertisers paid to have their products or web-sites mentioned. I mean what do I know about motorized bicycles. The last cycle I rode was an over-sized tricycle like you see in retirement communities. I was about 11 or 12 at the time and thought it was great. At least until I went down the street I lived on but wasn’t able to come back up the street. It was barely an incline and I had my feet strapped to the petals but I didn’t have the leg strength to climb it.

So my thoughts on any kind of leg powered cycle is purely intellectual. So I thought about it long and deeply and decided that offering any kind of opinion would be misleading. However, since everything required of the assignment is in this post, I guess I earned my $3.50.