The year in reflection

Two years ago I was hit by a truck and my life changed. The first year was all about pain: learning to manage it, expecting it, dealing with it day to day. This past year was an attempt to not be about pain anymore and I met with both success and failure. There were mitigating circumstances stemming from the most basic tenet of the human condition, which is that people suck.

Today I almost lost my temper at someone young and naive but caught my wits before I made an ass of myself and a stain out of them. A kid, just a 20 year old child, thought that it was Ok to poke fun at me. I kept composure and played it off. After all, he's just a simple, 20 year-old gay boy. As I recall, most of the gay friends I had when I was 20 were too consumed with themselves to watch their mouths. I remember my friend Micheal made the mistake of mocking Jon Ritter the day he died. I got angry then, and he realized his mistake.

The past two years, from then until now, have been a long and tedious process. My friends now have no idea the kind of monster I used to be. I was working two jobs, taking 16 hours of grad classes a semester, running off of gasoline and adrenaline. In a single week, I wrote over 70 pages of lab reports with illustrations, wrote a 25 page philosophy paper (that I got an A on), drove SOUTH of Miami to pick up my motorcycle, spent 18 hours to-in-and-from my motorcycle course, went to GA Tech for a robotics think-tank with Microsoft, and caught my flight to Alaska to visit my parents. I slept, maybe 15-20 hours total that week, but I got it done, and I got FIVE A's that semester.

Less than four months later I was run down by a for F-150 and I went from 100mph to zero so fast that it didn't seem like reality. Friends vanished. I was immobile. My prognosis was "Let's hope you can walk without a cane." That's the short version. The long version was a $30,000 surgery, titanium, leg braces of all shapes and sizes, five months on crutches, and almost a solid year of physical therapy. I got my surgery, my bike was wrecked, I couldn't walk, I was peeing into empty orange juice jugs, constantly hungry and in pain, and it was a battle to survive just to get food or to make it to the bathroom every two or three days to clean up and resupply my meals, which were primarily cans of tuna and nutragrain bars.

That was how I spent the summer of 2007. Alone. Rehabilitating. So doped up on pain medication that I couldn't concentrate on any given task for more than 20 minutes.

Getting your knee pulverized is an interesting sensation, though. I must say. I'd never broken a bone before. Feeling bones knit back together was strange.

People were scared by my accident. It freaked them out. I made people uncomfortable. I was even asked to NOT go on a trip to Texas to visit a friend of mine. Funny how you become ostracized because your misfortune makes everyone else uncomfortable. That's probably why I bonded so much with the folks at my Physical Therapy clinic. They were used to seeing beaten up and injurred people. They still smiled when I came in. I can't even count the number of friends I lost when I had my accident. Maybe I can count the number of Facebook wall posts I got when it happened. Cuz YA. Those were reassuring.

Not all the blame was on others. I honestly don't think I wanted to be seen. I used to be the guy people called when a refrigerator needed to go up a flight of stairs. Not so much anymore with a lot of metal where all my cartelage used to be.

During my "bed rest" I lost about 25 lbs. I hadn't been down in the 170's since I was in highschool. The crutches did wonders for my triceps. And the story of "Ya, so I got run over by a truck when I was on my motorcycle" was pretty bad-ass. Then there was the $500,000 settlement my lawyer worked out for me. He took a third. I bought a new car. I built a disgustingly expensive computer. And I finally got a cat. I'd always wanted a cat.

Hell. I also got a girlfriend. My first real attempt at a meaningful relationship that would last longer than any other. I should have been more selective. Just because someone shows interest in you doesn't mean you should offer yourself up as everything she ever asked for. I was just trying to make it work. I wanted to be happy. But her motivations are now and forever will be unknown to me, and the only thing I am certain of is her selfishness. The worst thing I could have done was throw money at the problem by buying her whatever she wanted, but it didn't stop me.

I got up to use the bathroom just now and relinguish maybe 3 of the last 8 beers I've had. Yes, I've been drinking heavily. I wasn't sure if I've been drinking to enjoy tonight or to avoid NOT enjoying tonight. My reflection in the mirror is horrible. I need a shower, a shave, and a lot of sleep.

In the last year, I've lost a house, friends/roommates. I moved. I got robbed. I lost my girlfriend. Classes are a pain in the ass. I smile for people who condescend to me like I'm an idiot. I may not be the best linguist or be very well read, but at least I don't live in a paperbag world that one good storm could weaken and tear through. But hey, what can you do? We live in a society that breeds narcissism. EVERYONE is special, didn't you know that?

When I come home to my little white house and my little black cat and there's nothing but the humming of computer case fans and wind chimes on my porch, I know, in the deepest and darkest alleys of my mind that I ought not put on the show of a simplistic, square individual of basic drive and mannerisms. But I do so anyway because it's easier than operating at full capacity all day long. It's easier than calling people out for their idiocy, hypocricy, and inconsistent thoughts. What holds me back? What keeps me grounded? That's easy. I'm scared to death to think for a moment that I'm better than anyone else. I know without a doubt that I come off as very elitist and condescending if I'm just reacting. But I don't want to be like that. I don't want to be an asshole. I'm no better than anybody else.

I really do look horrible right now. My eyes are red as hell because my allergies are flairing and I haven't been sleeping. And my left eye has been twitching for a few weeks now. Don't know if that's stress or pollen.

I've got school bearing down on me like a freight train. Two of my suggested paper topics for Historical Linguistics were shot down. A topic was given to me, but it's going to end up being a paper on Language Variations, and not historical linguistics. Ask me about pidgeons and creoles having been taught by Dr. Kretzschmar? You may not like the answer, Dr. Klein.

My motorcycle is still in the shop. Fuel leak. Rear tire. Front break pads. Coolant line. They've had it for a week. I wish I could have had it to ride today of all days. Not like it mattered. I was beaten into an in-class presentation that I had to shave from 20 minutes to 15, skipping four important slides, which was directly followed by the frustration of not being able to add a computer to our lab workgroup and three hours of Historical Linguistics. My eyes were hurting as bad then as they do now.

Where do I go from here? The summer. A thesis. Another year. PhD applications. Putting myself out there, risking rejection. I need to publish more. Go to conferences. Complete the half-dozen side projects I've shelved. Study for my orals. Defend. Graduate. Move away. Start over. Me, a little black cat, and a big black motorcycle.

Sometimes I stop and look at my age and wonder why I never had fantasies of being a poet or a musician or a writer or SOMETHING other than a puzzle solver. Probably has a lot to do with the accolades I got when I was a kid and solved math problems faster than anyone else in my class. That kind of special acknowledgement, the gratification from teachers and classmates is hard to give up. It's addictive. Losing it sucks. Getting it back is alright, but being aware of it makes you think of what you missed out on.

I fear I've written a book in my drunken haze. I really ought to continue with my plan for the evening which was more beer and a couple Kevin Smith films, hopefully passing out somewhere in the middle of either Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back or Clerks II. Odds are I won't remember a lot of what I said here because judging by the sliver of a scroll bar I have there, I've said A LOT. I wonder how much of this I'll enjoy reading tomorrow and how much of it will make me depressed or mad or regret writing it at all. I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

Mood Swings and Bad Temperment

It probably has a LOT to do with the fact that I'm cycling back onto the pills for my knee that are supposed to increase the amount of growth horomone my pituitary gland produces (thus upping my testosterone...), but I've been progressively and consistently pissed off all day today. I haven't lashed out at anyone or anything, thankfully. But damn, I just feel like ripping the doors off a car.

All day long, anything small that would normally roll off has been getting under my skin. I had to circle for 45 minutes today looking for a parking spot to go to Phonetics, and every last spot was taken RIGHT in front of me... ...spots that I could have gotten myself if the people in front of me would get off the phone and drive, or if the pedestrians on campus would cross at crosswalks, and NOT when I have a green light and they have a red hand!!!

I barely got my stats homework completed and turned in. I completely missed the mark on the first question. But I corrected it before turning it in, as no one else seemed to attack it the right way either.

And to top it all off, tonight, after 5pm, when I FINALLY got to my lab to sit down and get some lab work and school work done.... ........the simplest task, literally the LAST thing I expected to go wrong suddenly went wrong. The LTO-4 tape drive that I finally got installed and working properly in a windows PC last week was refusing to eject the tape I inserted. I spent over two hours pushing the eject button, powering the computer on and off, pushing the eject button even MORE, and again and again mashing the eject button to no avail! I finally broke down, pulled out a screw driver and proceded to take the computer apart screw by screw. Funny thing was, as soon as the drive ITSELF was removed from the computer, I gave it power, and the tape ejected like there was never a problem. So via a dark ritual of selectively inserting and removing the mounting screws for the drive, I managed to put it BACK INSIDE the computer in such a way that it reads, writes, and YES ejects without trouble.

Do I understand why or how this problem even occurred? Do I understand why I even bothered to power it up after I removed it and hit eject once again? NO I DO NOT. I'm just slightly quelled from boiling over to just simmerring now that the damn thing is FIXED.

Seriously. All day long, in those "quiet moments" that I'm generally thinking about work or projects or thesis or papers or friends or WHATEVER normal things, all I have been able to think about were all the people I've ever known who had gone out of their way to ruin my happiness. Pathetic, worthless people. And all day long today, I thought that wherever they are, and whatever they're doing, I hope that they're miserable or dead. At one point I was hoping I'd be diagnosed with six months to live: I'd compile a list of people to go after for sweet REVENGE.

It's gotta be the growth horomone stimulators. I've been taking them again for two days and I'm raging like crazy. Then again, it HAS been a bad week. My motorcycle is in the shop because it had a bad gas leak, it needs and new rear tire, new front brake pads, and the coolant line was ripped out accidentally when the Cycle World guys were taking it off the trailor. They've only had it four days, so I'm trying to be patient.

Not having my biks is NOT helping my mood at all. The fact is that the ride to and from school and between classes is the closest thing I have to meditative Zen state. When I'm on my bike and going, I'm not thinking about anything but the road and the world around me. I have to stay perfectly focused so that if something bad happens or if someone does something stupid, then I can avoid it (if avoiding it is possible, of course). It centers me. I'm not angry. I'm not sad. I'm not even happy. I'm calm. I'm focused. Nothing else matters.

So the longer I go without that 20-30 minutes out of my day, the longer I can see me getting more and more pissed off. This must be what normal people feel like when they don't get enough sleep.

BAH!!!! I hate everything.

Oh my, this was funny...

This is a facebook bumper sticker that I saw on my friend Mengles's ('s's's) profile. I'm not a fan of Twilight (books or movie). In fact, heart-throb highschool vampires is a pretty old premise dating back through Buffy and the Lost Boys. It's because so many take it so SERIOUSLY that I almost peed a little when I saw this sticker.

So of course, I sent it to as many people as I could think of who might appreciate a little thuggishness tacked onto their favorite pale-skinned star of the silver screen.

While I'm here, I might as well mention that the semester is coming to a fast close. So today, I'm going to clean my house particularly well... ...and watch it slowly get junked up again over the next few weeks as I'll be doing almost nothing but work until the close of the semester. There's a party tonight, but I put down "maybe" as an RSVP. I might get into some genius work groove. It's a birthday party for someone I don't know. I'm pals with his roommate, so my absence would go unmissed.

On a more somber note, I think I've gained an unhealthy five pounds. They must be destroyed.

Two Years Coming Up

April 23rd will be the two-year anniversary of my accident. Two years ago, I was hit by a Ford F-150 on my way to my 9am Psychology class on Riverbend Road. My knee was crushed between the truck and the gas tank of my motorcycle. My bike was totaled, and my knee was shattered. On April 25th, I underwent orthopedic surgery to put my leg back together, resulting in seven pins, a bar, and a plate of titanium.

I spent four weeks almost confined to the 10 foot distance between my bed and the bathroom. Then there were six months on crutches and almost a solid year of physical therapy. The prognosis is that I cannot run ever again unless the little bit of cartelage I have left wants to be ground up into dust. My leg gets stiff. I feel it when it gets cold and my bone constricts around the metal. On the better days, I don't feel *much* pain.

So in two weeks, I'm not sure if I want to have a party, go downtown, or stay home alone to get slowly and progressively drunk.

Last year on my first anniversary, I was forced to have a get-together. I did not enjoy myself at all. The whole ordeal, from start to finish, was very personal. I mean that in the strictest definition of 'personal'. Most of it, I'd say 90%, was me handling it alone. Truth be told, being forced to "party" last year was despicable. I resent the people who pretended I didn't exist while I was injurred and had the audacity to celebrate (in my own home) a year later.

The more I think about it, the more I'm leaning towards staying home and boozing. My birthday is Christmas Eve. I've never been able to celebrate THAT on my own terms. Sure, I was born on December 24th, but that day is more about my family and Christmas; always has been. My life was changed forever on April 23rd in a single instant. April 23rd is my day and no one else's.

So Ok. I think that settles that question. I have no intention of sharing April 23rd with anyone.

Captain's Log, Star Date ... ...uhhh

These days my mad computer skillz are in high demand. I'm writing software for my old Neuroanatomy professor. I've been getting debugging emails from our friendly Finnish collaborators who are having some Java trouble. We're getting a new server at work. A friend of mine is getting blue-screens. Another friend wanted me to copy Buffy to an external HD for her. And the boy-toy of another friend of mine needs to rescue data from an alleged failed harddrive.

I'll do what I can when I can, folks. Take a number. Hehe.

I've recently realized that I enjoy the feeling of being needed. The irony is that when it gets inconvenient or too excessive, I feel put-out and imposed upon. And even more ironic is that when suddenly nobody needs me, I feel sad, lonely, and expendable. Like Rambo.

The trick is to find the healthy balance. In relationships past, I discovered that I did NOT strike a healthy balance. My guiding principle was that if you truly care about someone, you should give try to give them whatever they want. This is the road to ruin. By friends, best friends, and girlfriends, I was slowly taken advantage of and taken for granted, and summarily dismissed once my utility ran out. As I recall, the only girl that ever seemed to be OBSESSED with me is the one that I was rude towards so that she'd go away. Anytime someone wants to chime in with the explanation to that one, let me know.

I had a long talk with my friend Rob a little while ago about this. And even though he's quite a bit younger than I am, he figured out the secret of keeping the healthy balance long ago. So I'm trying to make it happen: my guiding principle in all things will be a healthy balance. Just because I CAN do something for someone doesn't mean I will.

In retrospect, even NOW, I have/had friends who I only see or hear from when they need something. It's not like my feelings are hurt. Like I said, feeling needed is a warm feeling, like I have purpose. Some of these people I miss seeing, so when the Bat-Signal goes up, I fall over myself to help them.

Eh. I can't deny that I'll leap at the chance to see a few, select persons if they ask me for help. There are a couple persons who, anytime I hear from them, the "Oh Goody!" light goes on in my brain. But beyond this fact, I no-kidding suspect that I just have issues saying NO to people. Not that I'm afraid to do so. It's not that I don't want to disappoint anyone. It's that when someone asks me for help, NO is not the first thing I think of: the first thing I do is start thinking of how I can go about getting it done, solving the problem, conquering the new exciting challenge.

I'm not like most guys like that, I guess. It's fairly masochistic. I just have to watch out that I don't spread myself too thin.

The more specific implication is that the next woman I get involved with is NOT going to be the center of my universe. Done that a few times. Not doing that again. Not going to be an asshole, but not going to White Knight it the whole time either. It's especially hard in a relationship. Probably because I feel like I should be doing MORE than what I'm doing to apologize for whatever it is that I'm doing wrong. Because I'm not evil, I'm just a little self-centered and oblivious at times.... ....translation: I can't read minds.

We'll just see. Dating will be casual if not non-existant for the duration of my stay here in Athens. Unless someone really special turns up, I do not expect to leave here with anyone except my little kitten.

Study Break

In the simplest terms in the most convenient definitions of what we found out. That each one of us is a brain, an athlete, a basketcase, a princess, and a criminal.

Sincerely Yours,
The Breakfast Club

But seriously, folks. I'm happy to report that last Sunday I watched the final episode of Buffy. I wasn't disappointed. There were some deaths/survivals I may not agree with, and I wish Willow had a bigger part to play. However, I have to admit that of all the series finales I've seen, this was by far the most recent.

And to answer my own follow-up question, I have no desire to watch Angel. I've had my fill of the Buffyverse, and that was plenty fun by itself. No need for spin-off series or comic book continuations for me. Besides: I really don't like the actor who plays Angel.

I've been hanging out with George and Rob and Raheel a lot lately. Short spurts, mostly. I miss my grad student friends. Nobody tells obscene jokes like kids working for a PhD. I need to make a concerted effort to hang with my Ling and Psych friends more. I'm not being kept up to speed on who is hooking up with who and who we're mad at but still talking to anyway. The problem is that Psych Happy Hour is Thursdays when I have class, and Ling Happy Hour is Fridays when I'm generally exhausted and just want to go home.

Living alone again and being single again means I have a lot of time to myself. Time to myself means I lose track of the time easily. I find a project and dig into it and suddenly I don't know if I should be sleeping or going to class. This is bad, of course. This is also why I'm looking forward to the summer. If I can survive this semester, then I can concentrate on my AI thesis and study for my oral exams. After that, I can full-speed-ahead with my Linguistics degree and get my ducks in a row for PhD applications.

It's all pretty scary. Wherever I go for my PhD, it's going to be a new place, a new department, new faculty, and new friends. It'll be me and my little kitten venturing out into the unknown once again. Spring 2010 is when most decisions and offers will be made. That means, no doubt, that I shall spend at least 3 or 4 months facebook stalking people on my target campus. Fun, yes? Don't judge me!

My hope is that I'll be able to set myself up to live alone again, and this time, I'll start as fresh as possible. I'll be thrilled if I can find another little house, off the beaten path, for me and the Little Miss to live comfortably where the volume of my motorcycle will not disturb the neighbors. Setting up the house will be no problem, I'm certain. Years of moving from place to place have made me an expert in doing this. Socially, however, I just might be forgetting how to make new friends. I may turn into the ultimate loner. A rebel.

Who knows? I still have no idea where I'll be going. I'd be thrilled to get Colorado or Massachusettes or California, etc etc. I got the list widdled down to a whopping 15 target schools! I don't have a CLUE which ones (if any) will take little old me. Every single time I found a new program at another school, I'd look at the school facts, the student organization, and yes, of course, the ratio of guys to girls on campus. HEY. Come on. That stuff is important.

I'm a big fan of looking for houses and apartments online in the places I'd like to live, using Google Maps to estimate a morning commute from a house on the outskirts of town. I love to look at floor plans and imagine my furniture in there.

This is all moot if I don't get my shit done. We'll see how well I do this semester, then this Summer I'll try to put the last nails into my AI degree, and I'll go from there. We'll just see.