Because I comment on a lot of more contentious blogs than this one, I pull in readers who follow the links. I’m very happy that they stop by. However, since this site is different in form and substance from the other sites, I feel the need to express what this site is and what it isn’t and what I want it to be and don’t want it to be. There are all sorts of websites out there where one can express their views on the hot political topics of the day, but that’s not what I’m aiming to do here.

First and foremost, Hit Coffee is not a site for spiteful or contentious social commentary. It is a place where I jot down things that happen in my day-to-day life, thoughts about things that happen in my life, and thoughts on what’s going on in the world around us. The comment section is for people that want to share their thoughts and experiences as they relate to what I’m talking about. I want it to be a place where liberals and conservatives, whites and minorities, believers and non-believers, and Americans and non-Americans can feel comfortable. Unfortunately, that sometimes means that I have to put in place certain guidelines. Not just “everybody be nice” guidelines, but guidelines around what is and is not discussed around here. Some issues must be discussed with affirmative kindness, as Bob has put it, but some unfortunately raise our collective blood pressure so high so quickly that I try to steer clear of in general.

As of right now, those issues are: human biodiversity, immigration policy, George W. Bush, politicians attempting to replace George W. Bush, the War in Iraq, anthropological global warming science, and race politics.

For the most part I practice what I preach and I steer clear of these areas. When I do bring them up, I try to do so in a relatively apolitical manner and try (not always successfully) to kick dirt over my own views. If I mention my political views, it’s only to provide context and more in the tone of disclosure than advocacy. If I take a stance on an issue that could be considered political (copyright law, medical malpractice tort, etc) I try to focus more on the effects that the policy or policies have in the world as I see it. When I do this, I will generally provide more latitude in the comment section.

To some extent, gross generalizations are a function of life. It’s pointless to try to avoid it completely. What I would like to avoid is the painting of entire groups or people as “bad” or “evil”. I keep a particular eye on minorities, women, men, liberals, conservatives, feminists, Christians, Mormons, Muslims, atheists, southerners, immigrants (legal or illegal), or Americans in general. Groups that I am not worried about offending are terrorists, America-haters (as in people that despite America, not those that are critical of specific actions that America has taken or aspects of its culture), racists (as in people that believe that minorities are generally worthy of contempt, not mean people that simply hold political views that minorities don’t like), misogynists (see previous disclaimer, replace “minorities” with “women” or “men”), members of the FLDS, and people supportive of those that are attacking Americans and/or our troops abroad. I’d likewise ask that people that disagree with other people refrain from comparing them to any of these groups.

You may be wondering “Gosh, should I be worried about saying anything that might be considered controversial?” Well thus far, if you’ve commented before, there is not a problem or if there has been I have said something about it. I’ve never banned a reader and I’m not sure if I’ve actually deleted any comment that is not my own. I’ve clipped some, but usually having more to do with the accidental slippage of information about me than about anything inappropriate. At this point, the most action I usually take will be to shut down a conversation if I think it’s veering into uncomfortable waters. The long and short of it is that I don’t want to have to worry about who is saying what about whom whenever I’m away from the comment section for a while.

Thus far I haven’t. Thus far I have loved my commentariat. Every last one of you. I don’t want to do anything to discourage you from throwing in your thoughts and perspectives and experiences. Without an active comment section and the conversations that occur here, I probably would have stopped doing this a long time ago. This stated policy is not an attempt to change anything around here. Rather, it’s an attempt to keep this place as genial and open as it has always been.

Comments that veer off-topic are fine so long as they don’t run afoul of anything above. Comments that belong on one message but are accidentally posted onto another message will be relocated. If I ever get the point that I shut down a thread through WordPress, any comments placed on other posts to circumvent the thread-kill will be deleted.

As a courtesy to Hit Coffee readers, I will sometimes clean up someone’s post. I don’t modify content (except as where mentioned above), but if someone posts an HTTP I will replace it with a link. If someone double-posts, I will delete the first post.

Comments containing more than two links (whether typed out or HREFed) are automatically sent to moderation. I will clear them as soon as I can.

Blockquotes are discouraged in comments for technical reasons. If you are quoting something someone else wrote for reference, use Italics.

Comments that are cross-posted are fine, though I’d ask that you mention that you did so.

A guy named Josh Hosler has a neat website where you can see what the Billboard #1 single was on any given date, so I surfed around. It all reminds me of how out-of-touch I am and even more how long I’ve been out of touch. I look at the day before my birthday and I can’t recall a single song listed from the 00’s. My hipness apparently began in about 1991 and ended after 1996. I can actually name about 7 of 10 from both the 80’s and 90’s… but only one after 1996 (and a “country” song at that).

Alas, I cannot remember the song of my birthday, though interestingly the song in a previous year is Harry Nilsson’s “Without You”, which I’ve always had a place in my heart for (there was a period where I loved piano ballads with powerful voices). That lead to me Rhapsody and listening to the many, many versions of that song. Nilsson made it famous, but Mariah Carey’s is probably better known. Anyway, that lead me to Wikipedia to get more background, which lead me to one of the funniest videos that I’ve seen in a long time. (A video which is probably further proof of how out-of-touch I am).

Apparently, a singer for the Bulgarian version of “American Idol” did a cover of that song. The video became quite the sensation, so you’ve all probably seen it. Further proof of how out of touch I am. Anyway, I’m not a big American Idol person and I’ve frankly never seen the alure of the segments where they show wannabee contestants butchering songs. This, though, is priceless. Perhaps because of the language barrier. The exasperation of the judges and the back-and-forth at the end provide amazing bookends.

Apparently Mariah Carey was asked about it. It’s hard to hear her full response over the interpreter, and I’m loath to say anything nice about Mariah Carey (except that her version of Without You could have been much worse), but on the whole I thought she gave a pretty classy response.

-{Intro: Last night I called my friend Kyle to try to figure out how to fix some computer problems that perplexed me all of yesterday. I won’t go into the precise nature of the problems, except to say that they defy all rational explanation}-

trumwill: My computer woes are the source of much laughter at the office today

quenkyle: Believe it or not, your computer woes are the source of my laughter at my office today, too. None of us have ever heard of the drive partition thing or the IDE Controller card thing.

trumwill: Maybe on my resume I should put that I am a Quality Assurance pioneer that has investigated malfunctions never hereforto heard of in the IT world.

quenkyle: That’ll work right up until you mention that all the {excrement} is happening on your own personal systems.

quenkyle: So I guess you didn’t get it working?

trumwill: Nope. Tonight I’m going to try putting the card into a different computer and see what happens. Switching PCI slots didn’t help. So now that I’ve tried multiple OSes, countless hardware configs, and a handful of boot drives… I’m running out of options. Man, I hate technology

quenkyle: Yet you have a metric asstonne of it

trumwill: Yes. So, apparently, I hate myself even more.

One of the things that gets me through my daily commute is audio books. I’ve made it through the Harry Potter series, Orson Scott Card’s Ender/Bean novels, the Da Vinci Code, and the first of the Discworld series. Right now I’m listening to Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig.

Orson Scott Card gives an afterword at the end of most of the Ender and Bean books, which is really pretty cool. He talks about where some of his ideas came from or later on about the various attempts to get a movie made out of Ender’s Game.

One time he talked about what he liked about audiobooks and how in all honesty that may be the best media for a novel. It allows you to sit back and enjoy it. Though, he said, if the listener is anything like him he’s listening while driving behind some truck on the Interstate. He shared that one time he was listening to an audiobook and he got pulled over in a specific barren western state because he was more interested in the novel than the speed limit.

As luck would have it, I started listening to Ender’s Game on the move from Deseret to Estacado… and I got pulled over in the same barren western state for speeding. I didn’t get a ticket, though.

Most of the time, though, he’s talking about the novel and what it means to him. In the end it really adds to the story and sometimes helps me appreciate something that I missed. That’s what happens when they tell you about the book after the book has been read.

Some fellow with either Pirsig’s publishing house or Fantastic Audio, who produced the audiobooks (for both Zen and the Ender/Bean books), decided that they would instead have a foreword. I wasn’t worried at first because I figured “What kind of idiot would ruin a book right as someone is about to read/hear it?”

Apparently, some idiot from Pirsig’s publishing house or Fantastic Audio.

Now I already know what the last lines of the novel are, what their significance is, what I’m supposed to think of the main character, what I’m supposed to think of the antagonist, and what various characters are thinking throughout the book. All in a short five minute intro. Stupendous.

Michael Hogan can’t vote because he’s a Canadian, but I strongly suspect that he’s hoping that John McCain pulls out a voctory in November. I can’t imagine a better actor to play the part. Take John McCain, lose him a little bit of hair, shave off some years, and add some virility and a boatload of bitterness and Michael Hogan playing Colonel Saul Tigh is pretty much what you get, visually anyway.

Here’s a video. About half-way through you get a slightly better look at him:

-{Spoilers below}- (more…)

The day before yesterday I discussed a wall scroll. I narrowly avoided getting into a sidetrack discussion as to why they’d make a nude scroll to begin with and the rules they seem to play by when creating-enticing entertainment.

The Japanese take a slightly different view of nooditty* than we do. That’s not to say that they’re necessarily a whole lot more liberal on the subject (though they may be — I only see a fraction of what they do), but they seem to follow different guidelines at least as it pertains to animation. It’s too easy to say that Japanese animation isn’t almost always aimed at kids the way that our animation is. Even stuff that seems to be at least partly aimed at younger audiences has nooditty and therein lies the more crucial difference. I don’t have a problem withholding adult material from my potential future children, but what do I do about the kid-oriented stuff? Wait till they’re too old to more fully enjoy it? Show it?

From as near as I can tell, Japanese animation is cool with bare brests with one major caveat: no human fully-female brests. When I look back at the kid-oriented anime that I have seen, they seem careful to present brests only of characters are such that you can’t get full pornographic enjoyment out of it.

For example, one series that shows brests quite frequently is Ranma 1/2, but they only show the brests one of major character, Ranma himself. Yeah, “himself”, the character is a boy. Or a boy that physically changes into a girl at any rate and girl-Ranma goes bare-brested far more often than boy-Ranma does. None of the genuine girl characters (as far as I can recall) show brest. Another example is Tenchi Muyo, wherein one major character, Ryoko, gets brest-play (though I can’t recall if they show nipple, the scene that comes to mind is in a hot tub of sorts). Ryoko, it’s worth mentioning, is a human-looking monster of sorts (think Frankenstein’s monster in origin, but without the scarrage). I can’t recall completely, but they might be a little liberal with Ayeka, too, but she’s a human-looking alien (and if they are liberal, they’re not as liberal as they are with Ryoko). This doesn’t entirely count because it is slightly more aimed at an older audience (but not much older), but the character they are most flesh-liberal with in the seminal Neon Genesis Evangelion is Rei Ayanami, who is… wait for it… not entirely human.

None of this is to say that they don’t play heavily on sex appeal of their human characters. Just like American adolescent entertainment, they do, but as also with American entertainment, they do so within certain guidelines. Panties and cleavage and all that. They also play on the sex appeal of their not-entirely-human-female characters such as girl-Ranma, Ryoko, and Rei. Girl-Ranma’s nakid upper-half is shown far moreso than boy-Ranmas. Ryoko and Ayeka fighting in a hot-tub wasn’t entirely a piece made for character development, and so on. Nonetheless, I sense that they have clear boundaries like we do, it’s just different boundaries that don’t make as much sense to us. They make a distinction between girl-Ranma and love-interest Akane, but we would be less likely to notice that distinction than the fact that Ranma (boy and girl) is a minor, as is the physical development of Rei (Ryoko, on the other hand, is 800 or so years old and I think is supposed to look like she’s in her 30’s)

And that’s how I ended up with a nakid Key Mima on my wall. Because she’s kinda-sorta a robot, it’s no big deal. Absent giving someone a link to this post, it is kinda hard to explain to outsiders. And to kids, so there’s one more post coming up to round up.

* – I’d rather this post not make me blackballed with webfilters everywhere.

I don’t know about you all, but I like those little dangly things that you put in cars to make them smell good. I like’em a lot. They were particularly helpful before I stopped smoking in the car, but even afterwards they cover up the smell of whatever fast food wrappers might be in my car at any given time. Clancy, on the other hand, hates them.

It’s all a little bit funny because my sense of smell is crap and hers is good. But then again, maybe that’s why. Having a diminished sense of smell, I like things that smell strongly unless they’re particularly foul. Even if they are particularly foul, sometimes I like the smell anyway. I am the only person I know that likes the smell of stink bombs, for instance. I also think that farts smell interesting rather than particularly bad.

Several months back, Clancy’s car got a strange odor in it. It was one of the rare times when I noticed something before she did. Clancy’s car is not exactly a model of cleanliness, so we figured that there was something in the car that needed to be taken out. The car was clean, but the smell remained. It really never got on her radar until she left town and came back. I guess driving a car that doesn’t smell bad opened her nose to how hers smells. We still don’t know what it is, but it seems to be coming from the air conditioner.

While she’s been gone, I’ve been hanging one little dangly fake leaf after another.

Oddly enough, my car has begun to start smelling, too. Clancy noticed it first, but I noticed it almost immediately after. It’s something recent. She thinks it smells like a pee bottle. She really hates that I ever do that and is kind of paranoid about it. Just to be sure I cleaned out the car and there really wasn’t much of anything in the way of likely culprits inside of it. Doesn’t seem to be tied to the air conditioner, though.

—

A year or so ago, a youngish girl (12 or so maybe?) knocked on our door to sell me some smell spray of some sort called DAMN. The bottle says “DAMN that pet odor! DAMN that smoke smell! DAMN it all Fo’ Sho'” or something to that effect. I ordinarily resent door-to-door salespeople and I don’t like how everything from little league to band has turned out kids into little Amway saleskids. In this case, she made no pretense about it being for some sort of charity and simply said that she’s trying to earn money to buy a bike. A little bottle of no more than a couple ounces was $5, but she assured me that one spray goes along way. Well DAMN if she wasn’t right about that. Two shots makes your eyes water and it’s been almost a year and both bottles are still half full.

—

Meanwhile, now our kitchen smells. I know why that’s happening: the trash can is overflowing. Unfortunately, I have nowhere to take it. Somehow, our trash can has become the neighborhood dump. Seems like every trash day, the garbagemen empty it out but then someone comes in and fills it back up again. A lot of times it’s beer, but lately it’s been like construction material or something. I was actually impressed the last time they did it because they managed to fill that thing so efficiently that you would think that they were a professional packer or something.

Friday is garbage day and hopefully I’ll have a place to put it then. In the meantime I might have to place it outside or something. On the other hand, the rotting whatever that’s producing the odor smells quite interesting. It really only bothers me because I know that it’s supposed to.

I don’t wear the fact that I do a lot of writing on my sleeve like I used to. If it comes up I will say that I wrote or that I do some writing, but will only refer to myself as a writer if it is understood that I am (mostly) an amateur. I have in fact been paid for my writing in the past, but never has it amounted to more than minimum wage when the hours put in are accounted for. Besides, I’m more proud of the writing that never made me a dime because it was far more ambitious and time-consuming. So, despite the fact that I’ve written four novels (in varying degrees of editing disrepair), I don’t generally identify myself as a writer.

To the extent that I have referred to myself as a writer, I have never tried to suggest that someone that has had a novel published or has had even moderate success with articles is some sort of equal or colleague. I’m not saying that they’re better than me in any grand scheme, but I think it does them a great disservice to suggest that what I do is the same as what they do when they have dealt with deadlines, professional editors, compromised intellectual properties, and so on. So while I may trade writing techniques or something like that, I don’t suggest that the only difference between the two of us is that we’ve gone different routes. We have, of course, but my route is easy and theirs is at least some degree more challenging.

Lastly, I would never brag that if I really wanted to, of course I could get published. Maybe I could, maybe I couldn’t. The truth is that I have much improvement to do, I’ve never sacrificed what I wanted to write in order to write something more publishable, and there are elements of luck and connections involved.

I mention all of this so that I can segue into a pet peeve of mine. Every now and again I’ll run into a self-described “writer” that earns the quotes around the description due to the technicality that he has never written anything more substantial than an infrequently updated blog or LiveJournal. They frame everything in terms of what they want to do or what they could have done because they have nothing hard that they can point to. To make matters worse, they don’t use their conversation with me, someone that has actually gone through the process, for advice… but rather they are the ones that end up giving advice to me. Don’t get me wrong, I welcome feedback on what I’ve written and ideas on what I’m writing, but I get annoyed when people tell me “You should have this happen and that happen.” I’ll admit, it’s a thin line sometimes, but tone-of-voice makes a difference (as does how well I know the person).

What they end up doing instead is stacking their awesome idea for a novel that they’ve never written and compare it to either what I’ve written or how I describe it. The book I wrote isn’t the book that they’d write, thus they are more talented than I. Occasionally I’ll see a different tactic. The reason that they haven’t written anything is that they’re too good to. My ex-girlfriend Libby used this one. She just talked about how she could really write something great that could get published, but she’s just so much of a perfectionist that she’d hate and couldn’t bear to let anyone see it. At least there is an admission that perhaps it wouldn’t turn out as well as imagined, but it’s still the same “too good” attitude that some amateur writers in regards to why they’ve never tried to get anything published even though what they do is better than the dreck that’s out there. Amateur writers don’t want to be a sell-out to the publishing industry because their work is so important, the non-writer writers that I’m referring to don’t want to sell-out to reality (when it’s obviously their own limitations that they’re afraid of).

It’s actually gotten to the point that one of the reasons I don’t talk all that much about my writing unless it comes up (and even then not even when it comes up sometimes) is not only because I don’t want to set up the pretense that I am something that I am not, but rather because I don’t want to get into a discussion about the writing I do and the writing that they don’t do and the comparative value of each. I don’t want to see the countless hours I’ve spent organizing my ideas and sitting down reduced to an option no more or less valid than choosing to instead eat Cheet-Os and play some GameCube.

I’ve been taking advantage of the fact that my wife is living in another state to redecorate the apartment. When she comes into town next week, I’ll have to unredecorate at least one item in the bedroom.

Most of the stuff I have up is fine at least for the time being. I finally got around to hanging my framed college degree. I pinned up the license plates that we’d talked about putting up. The more controversial thing that I did was dust off my anime wallscrolls and put them on the wall. For those of you that don’t know, a wallscroll is like a poster except made of a light canvas material (or something to that effect) that rolls up and unfurls. They’re nicer than posters, but they’re still giant anime images.

There’s one in particular that is so certain to be problematic that I’m going to take it down before she arrives. Hanging on the opposite wall is a scroll from Key: The Metal Idol. Though I’ll write more on it at some point, Key is largely a Pinocchio story of a robot girl’s quest to become human. Sounds childish and silly, I’m sure, but like the best fairy tales it uses fantasy to illustrate aspects of the human condition and like the best fairy tales, there is a certain darkness to it. Since I’m going to write about it later, I won’t go into any more detail except to say that it is the only anime ever to touch me so profoundly as to reduce me to tears.

So what’s the problem with the scroll? Key is naked.

The picture is not-at-all sensual in nature to me. Key takes the form of an either pre-pubescent or early-pubescent girl. She is too young (and perhaps too mechanical) to have a love interest in the show and the sex appeal is saved for another character in the show.

I’m honestly a little bit frustrated with the makers of the scroll. Though the symbolism of the nudity is important, a couple well placed cogs would have made a world of difference. That’s what they did for the DVD cover (though in all fairness, that could have been done on this side of the Pacific). Or they could have used a mist to cover the upper region as they did the lower region (though it’s clear that she’s naked, the vagina is not visible). Instead, they stuck to their artistic guns and made things difficult for those of us that bought it.

The nudity on the scroll, as I see it, is not the nudity of sex but rather the nakedness of being born. She’s bursting out of the robot shell that has protected her into a figurative human birth with all of the vulnerability that confers. The look on her face is not one of sexuality or timidity/innocence (often a focal point of sexuality in anime), but rather one of abject fear. As strange as it sounds, it’s her eyes rather than her body that capture my attention.

I say all this and yet I know the problem that having a nude cartoon girl on the wall represents. However comfortable I am with it in a non-sexual manner, it’s not something that I would be comfortable with if company was over. I certainly wouldn’t expect Clancy to be. In truth, despite the powerful symbolism of the scroll, if there were another Key scroll out there I would have bought that instead. To date I’ve only ever run across one scroll at all with any nudity… and wouldn’t you know it it’s the only scroll available for my favorite anime series of all time.

Addendum: I decided that it would be in everyone’s best interest if I brought up the scroll and shared it with her prior to mentioning it here. As it turned out, she is perfectly cool with the scroll. In fact, she likes it more than any of the others. Most of the scrolls merely show all or some of the characters of the show and have the title, like a publicity poster. This poster, though, doesn’t even mention the anime that it belongs to and unlike the others has narrative imagery. Even before I explained what it was supposed to represent, she had an alternative narrative that she could relate to. She saw it as a girl breaking out of her shell. Though she’s never seen Key (I plan to show it to her at some point — it may be the only anime that I do), at an earlier point in her life she broke out of her shell and went from being an extremely passive girl to a quite opinionated woman. So it stays on the wall!

When I was a junior in high school, there was an attractive, I made the acquaintance of Becky Moran. I didn’t have any classes with her, but she had previously dated this other guy that I knew named Steve Celtaine. I knew him through Todd Derracks, who I also didn’t have any classes with but who I knew from junior high. Why I couldn’t make better friends with the people that I actually did have classes with escapes me but is probably symptomatic of the same disease that prevented me from ever dating anyone that went to my high school. Of course, there were other factors in the latter phenomenon, as Becky Moran demonstrates.

Becky was a notably attractive tall redhead. She wasn’t modelesque or anything, but she was somewhere in the mid-to-upper twos. She was tall and leggy with an outstanding figure. Had she cleaned up nicer, she could have been at home on a Hollywood set. But she didn’t clean up particularly nice at all, nor did she seem to want to. She was in the ROTC with Todd and Steve, where femininity wasn’t particularly valued. That’s probably why she hung out with the ROTC crowd anyway, because they didn’t ask her to be someone she wouldn’t have been very good at being anyway.

Becky seemed to hone in on me very quickly at the lunch table where Steve, Todd, a couple other ROTC guys, and I ate lunch for a short while. She seemed to keep drawing me into conversation, but she and I really didn’t have much of anything to talk about. Not long after she started to eat with us, another ROTC girl joined us at the table. This is a story unto itself, but the site of the other ROTC girl, who seemed like a perfectly pleasant individual and wasn’t hideous in any obvious way, made me physically ill. I had to find some other place to eat lunch. After that, Becky started tracking me down in the hallway and periodically where I was hiding at lunch.

The most convenient place for her was after sixth period on our way to the bus. Every day when I left my last class, she was always right there in the hallway waiting. She would tell me about her day and ask about mine. After a week or two, she started putting her arm in mine as we walked down the hall. After a month or so, she made a habit of kissing me on the cheek when we parted ways. She started inviting me to parties that she was attending, but I always declined because I wasn’t the partying sort, I had doubts if I would fit in with her friends (Steve and Todd notwithstanding), and I figured that the girl who made me physically ill would probably be there, too. The she asked for my help studying, which was an offer I couldn’t refuse due to Will Truman’s First Rule of Female Interaction (the subject of another post).

Not long after we started making study plans, she disappeared. I later found out that she had gotten suspended from school. At first I was relieved because it meant the pressure was off. I no longer had this person clinging oddly close to me. Then, after a couple of weeks, the thought occurred to me that she might maybe could have possibly been romantically interested in me. Like, for real.

I won’t say that the thought never crossed my mind before that epiphany, but I always dismissed it pretty quickly. Girls as attractive as that are not interested in guys like me. Girls with temperaments with hers aren’t interested in squares like me*. She had two metric tons of male friends and she’d dated guys like Steve that were more obviously appealing than myself. But as I thought about it after her disappearance, I realized that she had never, ever displayed the affection for any of them that she did for me with the exception of Steve and that was more clearly of the hug-because-we-hug sort of interaction rather than putting her arm in a relative stranger’s as she did with me.

It very well could be that my initial instincts were correct and that she was just being overly friendly to someone that she did not consider as more than a friend, but the more I’ve learned about women over the years the less likely that is. One big thing that I didn’t realize at the time is that I’d become thin. I still viewed myself at the time as the fat kid that girls didn’t really ever want in any romantic capacity. I’d also, without realizing it, become a much more sociable person. I learned how to interact with people. I didn’t realize that some of the biggest barriers that were holding me back romantically had been lowered.

Becky Moran came to my mind due to a thread in Bobvis on the subject of sexual harassment. Even if I had realized what Becky was up to (assuming that she was up to anything), nothing ever would have come out of that relationship (except, as Steve mentioned when he suggested that I ask her out, the loss of my virginity). There are a couple others that I think might have been baiting me to ask them out that things might have worked out with (at least for a while), but not really her. Nonetheless, it stands as an example of all that I didn’t know when I really wish I had known it.

* – Not true, in high school anyway. I discovered later that my squaredom combines with a relatively open and tolerant attitude (by the standards of my surroundings, anyway) can be rather appealing for particular sorts. I had an unusually high number of freak female friends. Even if they weren’t interested in me romantically, I seemed to draw a lot of them. My first technical relationship was with a girl very similar to Becky in that regard.