Strange post ahead. Maybe you should just go.
I don't know for a fact that special holiday times are more awkward for geeks in general, but I can say with a high degree of certainty that they are fairly difficult for me and for every person that I know. Gabriel's panel is perfectly accurate, and mine is an utter fabrication, but Robert (who is also seen here) probably has us beat. He spends the holiday in Utah with someone else's family, and in addition to making him a big pot of unadorned white rice to eat - for Thanksgiving - they deal with him as though Asians are some organic novelty, wholly without precedent. I consider myself fairly sheltered, my isolation is nearly absolute and I abhor the touch of man and woman alike. However, I am aware that people whose families were originally from other countries are sometimes born here.
Every year, my mother gets me a new self-help thing for Christmas to, I presume, salve my failures as a human being. Last year, it was a calendar of daily directives from Dr. Phil, who I firmly believe is a mongrel, more beast than man. What that creature has to tell me about being a good person I could no doubt learn from any mute animal. This year, my mom has managed to combine both her annual insult to my intelligence and her incessant proselytizing with a book called "Wild At Heart: Discovering The Secret of a Man's Soul." You might be thinking that I invented that title in an effort to amuse you - but no. Like AIDS, it is only too real. The author, John Eldredge, apparently suffered some emasculating experience as a child and now believes that all men resemble himself, i.e., they are dry and damaged husks. Then, he suggests a new template to replace these irreparable shells, one that sounds uniformly horrible to me. I would pity him if he had not become so fabulously wealthy selling his man-kits. It is, no doubt, a simplification - but it's no more a simplification than the things he put in his book: there's nothing wrong with a man that a Playstation 2 and a copy of Vice City can't cure.
I suffer through these inane books, calendars, and men's relationship workbooks out of some twisted filial duty, choke them down, and by the time I finish them sure enough I feel miserable about my life and the decisions I've made. These materials constitute a strange and mercenary branch of psychology and evangelism that cannot be said to have as its aim the resolution of mental or spiritual ills.
I apologize, sometimes I write my diary here and forget that I run a gaming site.
Happy New Year, I suppose, and Happy the other holidays.
(CW)TB out.
here comes oblivion
