Autobobots wage their battle to destroy the evil forces of...the Decepticons!

In Taiwan there's two kinds of pirated merchandise. The kind the fell off the back of a truck, but at least it's got the right paint scheme. And the kind made of grade G plastic on a factory mold made by shamelessly reverse-engineering an official product. The kind of crap that catches your eye for a second with a recognizable shape, until you realize you're looking at a yellow and green Optimus Prime, called a "Transformable."

When I saw this I sang, "Transformables! ...Not what you'd expeeect!"
Which I still find funny.
Also I've been watching the Transformers - Animated series on Veoh. It's an American children's cartoon, so, awful, but I've been enjoying it. The pilot was three episodes long and Starscream ran around starscreaming it up, so that was fun for a nostalgic kick. A few episodes later the Dinobots got a chace to poke their heads out of retirement, and that was fun too. Grimlock makes me laugh. I'm looking forward to seeing what the show does with Megatron.

I worked the first day of a month of subbing for Mr. M today, and I feel less confident now than I did before I went. My wife says I did well, but I didn't feel like I did. I taught four classes today, and almost every time I said anything at all, they stared at me blankly. I kept running up against the end of the reading material with nothing planned to do when they were done, because I hadn't expected them to finish so quickly, and I would have been pleased and impressed if the problem had been that the work was beneath them. Unfortunately it was very clear that the students had little to no concept of what they were reading.

There was a thing about a narrator sharing a toad with his friend, and I had to explain what a toad was, and then what sharing was, and it is very difficult to explain abstract concepts like sharing and Circque du Soleil, and why the Beatles-themed circus show is called "LOVE" in allcaps.

So we read this thing and it says, "The Cirque du Soleil is a different kind of circus!" And I'm like, "Okay so do you know what a circus is?" and they're like, "No."
And I just sort of go...uh...fuck. But actually no, I think that might have been my best class today.

Anyway, I feel like I just blundered, badly, through a day of teaching and they're going to notice that I only have one work outfit, and when I ask the boss if she has anything permanent for me, she's going to want me to go away.
I don't think this is very realistic, but that's how I was feeing until this morning when I decided, "I can totally do this," and then I did it, and I'm thinking about doing it for a week, and then I think about doing that all over again three more time, and I think "I can't do this." But I'll probably be fine again tomorrow.

I feel like I'm actually getting worse at driving the scooter. I think I'm the only one who gets worse at doing things with practice. That reminds me of a Metalocalypse quote.
"I am slowly learnink hows to unplays the guitars."

I keep falling asleep and I really should go to bed because I have work tomorrow and I didn't get enough sleep last night. Two in a row sounds like a bad plan.

This house is near the top of a mountain. That means that no matter how pleasant it is in town, after a half-hour drive, we arrive at our chilly mountain home. Our house, as has been mentioned, has no insulgoddamnlation, and NO heating whatsoever! We have one surly cheap plastic space heater. It's basically a toaster someone pumped up on steroids and then cut in half. It's two heating coils mounted into a chintzy plastic frame with faulty wiring. It's a peach.
But it does manage to keep hypothermia at bay.
Okay I don't think we'd get hypothermia.
Oh, also, one of the two staircases which lead between the 1st floor (kitchen, shower) and the 3rd (bedrooms) likes to have condensation on the walls and cieling, which drips down and makes the stairs kind of slippery. Sometimes also, the kitchen floor is slimey, as is the upstairs bathroom. The shower room is perpetually nasty, and one of two refrigerators does not work at all, nor has it for some time, as I understand it, yet it is FULL of ROTTING food. Sometimes while we're cooking, we'll be washed over with the unmistakable aroma of Dumpster.

But enough bitching, I feel confident that we'll be able to move soon to a reasonable apartment. This will be a happy thing. Life will also be more livable when we get someone to show us where we can buy high-quality organic meat and produce. I miss cheese. The only decent pizza places we've found wouldn't last a day in Portland, let alone New York, and they were overpriced. We found a Mexican place which was delicious, but underfilling and also overpriced.
A burrito, as in...a burrito. What you, as a Portlander (if you are one) must surely think of as..."a burrito" was roughly equivalent to $9 US. The burritos at this place were very tasty, but also very small. The 300 元 burrito was almost the size of anything you'd get from virtually any taqueria on America's western coast. But that is far too much to pay.

Ahem. But enough bitching, I said....

Here's something that happened to me:
I gave myself food poisoning like a moron by eating some fried rice that had sat out all night. I tried to cook the death out of it first. "But I failed. Miserably!" (Police Chief Brian Irons, RE2)
First I felt fine. Then some hours later I felt like Satan had made a summer-home in my bowels. Some more hours later I was weeping and vomiting into the toilet, cutting an exceptionally pathetic figure of pantslessness...it probably would have been funny if it weren't also horrifying.
Puking my guts out and screaming my abdominal pain into that Lovecraftian abyss of a toilet, I suddenly found myself making words!
Having hit the absolute bottom of self-esteem and comfort, while at the same time feeling unconditionally beloved by my wife, who held me while my organs staged their violent coup, I found myself screaming things like, "I hate you Dad!" and "You're evil!" and "I have emotions!"

So...that was interesting. I mean I've known for a very long time that I'm angry at my father. But I realized then that I hadn't allowed myself to actually experience the full ferocity of my anger. I could talk about why, but something that became a reoccurring theme that night was that the more I rationalize, the less I feel. It's a way I've been using to cut myself off from my emotions, and that coldness makes me feel dead.
All the slime and spite and evil selfish hatred for the world that my dad pretends he doesn't feel he poured into me and in my guts it became a virulent toxin, poisoning me for most of my life. If not all of it. It took an ocean of distance and some time, and someone that makes me feel safe, loved, and known, but finally my body rejected the darkness and shoved it out.
The combination of totally unchained, top-of-my-lungs screaming and pure bile may have scarred my throat a little, and my voice sounds deeper, or at least drier to me now.

It was my wife who asked me the question which caused me to realize that the reason I'm so upset is that I loved my father, and still do. That's exactly why I hate him so god damn much. He and others are why I have a baseline fear of men in general. I realized that I thought of all men as sleazy misogynist pricks (television in the '90s did not help), and I was terrified that people might see me that way, or worse, that I might be one and delude myself into being unaware of it (like my father). My father is why I'm afraid that people will hate me if I'm attracted to a woman. Because I always hated it when he displayed his attraction, because he's fucking skeez.
I'm constantly nervous that (most) men are going to start competing with me over whatever. I don't want to fucking compete with you, you troglodyte, leave me alone! I don't want to have to be better than you or worse than you or whatever. I just want to mind my own fucking business.
My dad couldn't observe anything I did without judging it against his own tastes. If I was watching a cartoon it was stupid, if I was listening to some music it was derivative, if I was playing a video-game, the music was stupid, the voice acting was stupid, and the characters probably looked stupid, or moved wrong. If I was playing a racing game, he was unimpressed if anywhere was off-limits, like the bay, or inside buildings or whatever. If I was playing a game based on New York or San Fransisco, his two favorite cities, and I showed it to him, that street isn't next to that street, what's that supposed to be, and wow it sure is small.
If I ever did anything exciting, it was usually met with a story about how he had done something similar but far more impressive in his youth. I honestly believe that he does not think he ever intended to put me down. But he's a vile evil subtle fucker and I don't care.
It may sound like I'm overreacting, because I'm not actually talking about the really insidious shit, because it's so subtle and manipulative, that it would take a fucking book just to set up the contexts and situations in which he oozed his hatred into my subconscious. Fuck! And my conscious mind, while I'm at it! Sometimes he wasn't subtle at all, like whenever he was in a bad mood for WHATEVER reason I usually didn't get to know (because to talk about his emotions would be to admit that he was less than 100% super cool chill-out dude all the time)(though in retrospect I think it was around the time he was having marital difficulties with his...third? Wife.) he would just endlessly push all my buttons until I ran out of patience and screamed at him, which gave him what he wanted, which is to act like he's so rational because he's not screaming, and I must have some kind of bizarre problem to just randomly flip out like that.

Looking back, I think he must have been aggravating me in order to create someone who was acting the way he felt so that he could project his rage onto me, making an externalized sort of mascot for his own anger, which he could then easily dismiss as a force outside himself, all the more easily dismissed because I was like, seven. Or eight. Or five, or thirteen or fifteen or twelve or seventeen or twenty-two. Younger than him, anyway. He's always had a big thing about years equaling experience, and therefore wisdom. What an asshole. Anyway, that's just what I think were his motivations. It doesn't really matter, because the result is that I was miserable and rarely had the freedom to feel emotions which were genuinely mine. I mean my anger at him for being a prick to me for the sole purpose of being a prick to me, that was mine, but as soon as I expressed it he would dismiss it and shut me down, because that's what he was trying to do with his own anger.

God, where was I? Oh yeah, so I got food poisoning and puked, and puked, and when there wasn't anything left in my stomache, all this childhood shit flew out of my throat instead. When it was all out I felt amazing. Weaker'n shit, but really blissfully happy. It took me about a day to recover enough to move around the house, but when I did I discovered that I was no longer afraid of the dark. I wasn't like, phobic before or anything, but walking into a totally dark or very dim room would often start a slow panic which could only be alleviated by light. I find this is no longer the case (unless I have reason to believe that I may walk through spider-webs, which isn't all that common). I'm not certain why, but the sensation is that there is no longer anything in the shadows not to see. A day after, I began rationalizing my cathartic experience, and I started to feel the sense of freedom I'd attained labor as the cold, greasy chains snaked their way back into place. At the time, I felt something come in the door (I was alone downstairs in the kitchen, which is near the door we use as our primary entrance) and near the kitchen. I realized instantly that it was the thing in the dark, it was my fear, returning, and I made a decision feel instead of rationalizing. I faced the fear thing, the shadow, and forced it back out the door.

We've heard that this place is mildly haunted, but this was absolutely an internal thing, a part of me manifesting itself in my imagination. The anthropomorphization of my fear. It was handy to have something to tell to fuck off. Except that wasn't really what made it leave again, it was that I admitted it was there, allowed myself to feel it without being ashamed of myself for being afraid of the dark (not calling myself immature), it was like shining a light into a dark corner.

I've also been able to write more freely since the catharsis, and I feel the love I already felt for my friends more...I'm not sure how to describe it. More definitely? Intricately, purely?
"That was quite the cocktail." (Solid Snake, MGS)

I don't know, but it's something, and I want to hang on to it for as long as I can. Forever being the goal.

Uhhhhh...that's all. I guess? Yeah. For now, anyway.