I believe in families / I believe in hooking up

I have made some progress in resolving my cognitive dissonance regarding monogamy.  Or rather, I have made some progress in determining how I will progress in resolving said dissonance.  On one hand, I am somewhat comfortable with my current model for sexual interaction.  Here’s how it normally works: I quickly evaluate girls that I meet, attempt to charm them if I like what I see, occasionally succeed, and once I’ve gotten my positive signals I aggressively pursue intimacy and sex.  Then, a month or so later, I get bored, practice avoidance, meet up for casual sex when convenient, and start thinking about the next girl.

Every so often, though, an event like, say, my little brother’s wedding, turning 24, or being home while I prepare to move cross-country (hi, welcome to my last three weeks), gets me thinking long-term.  I can’t help but concluding, every single time, that my life will be a complete and utter failure if I don’t succeed in creating a real family, complete with a stable marriage, kids, and reasonably accessible relatives.  Seriously, as much as my current behavior contradicts it, I cannot escape the conclusion.  How is the life of a 50 year old player supposed to be meaningful?  Do I really believe I’m going to content myself with going out to bars and clubs on weekends my entire life?  I guess I’ve been lucky enough to be part of a reasonably stable and supportive family, but I can’t really imagine a better long term arrangement.  And this is coming from the atheist son of a fundamentalist Christian family.

Unfortunately, the very idea of monogamy frightens me.  Every time I ponder it, I give myself outs and allowances to cheat.  Novelty plays a huge role in my sexual interests, as does body, and I can only wonder where my mind will go when my wife is no longer a tight young thing.  So far, not promising.

On the other hand, I have had one relationship this year that has me optimistic about my chances in marriage.  My best friend this past year has been a girl, and although there is no sexual chemistry whatsoever between us, it’s this kind of relationship that reminds me that permanent relationships between people are possible.  I don’t think a relationship based on sexual attraction can be permanent, but one based on friendship and mutual understanding can be.  When I find the girl that I can share that with, and sexual attraction that will last long enough to pump out a few kids, then maybe I’ll be ready for “phase two”.  If everyone is lucky, by then I’ll need boner pills just to get it up, and the whole cheating thing will be a pointless worry.

Finally, how does my current behavior support this goal?  I believe that the way to come to terms with my sexuality and to not allow my life to be dominated by questions and frustrations is to experience as much as I possibly can, to explore intimacy with as many different girls as possible.  I know I learn through each relationship; I feel a better intuition for the motivations and feelings of my last partner than any before that. I do have one strong lingering doubt.  Is it possible to begin a relationship based on friendship and understanding with a sexual encounter?  My gut tells me yes, but I have yet to experience it.

I bought a bound leather journal today to proxy for my blog while I’m road-tripping over the next month.  I’ve already (actually, just before writing this post) written my first entry and I’m somewhat interested in the new tone; I feel like I’m writing to myself and not an imagined reader, and the results are a bit more introspective than my usual.  Hopefully I can keep it up, and if the contents of the journal are noteworthy at journey’s end, I will reproduce them here.

More Sex!

The girl I mentioned in my June post was pretty nice.

The relationship turned into meeting weekly for casual sex.  A mutual lack of personal interest made this the third least dramatic relationship of my life, right behind the other two in the past two years where I had sex with the same girl frequently and never really talked to her.  The difference in this one is we actually engaged in pillow talk the first two times, before it devolved into glorified masturbation.  Also, she liked to be on top.  I didn’t like her to be on top.  Tension!  Second hook-up in row who either totally gets off just from sex, or has no interest in being finished off after the Event.  Awesome.  I’m still not sure where I stand on ensuring a partner’s satisfaction.  I want to make sure they keep coming back for more, but on the other hand, I’m not going to go out of my way if they won’t ask for something.

I went to a party a couple weeks ago and met this totally fascinating drunk girl.  I was fucking jazzed to bang this girl, because I could tell she wanted to.  We had been flirting off and on the entire night and things were just getting to the point of decision when… her friend kicked her out of the party and told her to go home.  Damn the cockblock!  I complained about it on the way home to a girl friend and she got huffy and said that she would never date someone like me, someone who wanted to have sex with drunk girls.  I’m really trying to figure out what’s wrong with it, I swear, I just can’t.  The only phrase that comes to mind when I considered the possibility was “it seems like it would have been fun”.

Wall-E’s inadequate conclusion

I really, really wanted to love this movie. I should have loved this movie: First of all, I’m crazy about two of Pixar’s recent films, The Incredibles and Ratatouille. The former was a nearly perfect superhero movie as far as I’m concerned, with fantastic action sequences, creatively employed powers, a complex lead, an interesting villain, a decent message, and, perhaps most importantly, a hilarious sequence of scenes involving the team’s haute costumer (”…and guest”). Ideally, the climax of such a movie would deliver a moment where each member of the team realized his full potential as an individual, while also complementing the abilities of the others, in order to finally and barely overcome the nemesis. The movie did not quite accomplish this, but it tried, and I give it credit.

I mention this because I believe that you choose a genre for a reason. Bringing the superhero genre to a film about a family was brilliant because it gives the opportunity to show, spectacularly, a family finally coming to appreciate each other for their unique characteristics. Ratatoille, similarly, used the dynamic and intense field of French cuisine, with its high heat and bold flavors, and exploited the natural enmity between vermin and cook to tell a rich story about what it means to have a passion, what it feels like to be an outsider, and, finally, what it takes to balance a new life with an old one.

In short, Pixar does not mess around. So when they chose to do science fiction for their latest film, I was thrilled. I love science fiction. I’m not talking about space opera here, although that can be great as well. True science fiction comes down to thought experiment. What would happen if an advanced civilization was reduced to near extinction, being chased around the galaxy by ruthless enemies? While we’re at it, what if we couldn’t even tell whether these same enemies were human or not? Battlestar Galactica is currently the epitome of what science fiction can and should be, but there is a long tradition of great science fiction that works in this same vein: Ask an important question, think about your conclusion, and invent the technology you need to tell the story, skipping the messy, unimportant details.

Wall-E sets the stage well in this regard, in both the primary and background story lines. How does one express love, or even less fall in love, without words or facial expressions? What
will we become if we are forced to leave this planet? And, on the grandest level, what is the endgame for our society? This is the makings of good science fiction. Furthermore, Pixar presents magnificently, demonstrating creatively the language of the film through Wall-E’s entertaining interactions with his environment, and communicates the failures and ultimate fate of humanity quite effectively. Greed and ignorance have destroyed our planet and exiled us to the cold reaches of space. Remember: greed and ignorance.

The love story mostly succeeds, although I have a few issues here as well. From a feminist standpoint, Wall-E’s seduction is somewhat offensive. Girl arrives, demonstrates her superiority, tolerates boy, then passes out for reasons out her control. Boy then possesses, gropes (check out when he pries her arm out), and ties up girl, then stalks her when her parents come to pick her up. Sensationalized account notwithstanding, it is a very traditionalist and outmoded account of courtship. Without spoiling anything, I also found the climactic moment unsatisfying. Although it would have been devastating to the film’s audience, I feel that they missed an incredible opportunity for true tragedy. Kind of like tacking on a happy ending to a Hans Christian Andersen fable. Still, the ability of the Pixar animators to communicate a wide range of genuine feeling through their robot actors is impressive and worthy of accolade.

OK, with everything else out of the way I can finally get to my serious beef with the film. How does humanity deal with the awakening provided by Wall-E and the revelation of plant life on earth? Apparently, by acting like spoiled, petulant children. Humanity’s surrogate in the film is the captain, who takes on the mantle of Man of Action on behalf of the drooling, squealing, and, later, helplessly flailing masses. When the captain learns about earth, provided via the same idyllic scenes that in our own time lull us into fatal inaction, he is overcome with resolve to return to earth. Never mind that he has acquired no actual information about the current state of earth. Never mind that his apparently competent and well-informed autopilot seems to think that this is an extremely bad idea. Or, for that matter, that we have no reason to believe anyone but the autopilot can even fly the ship… No. I want to go to earth and I want it NOW.

So, here are the qualities of humanity’s savior: greed and ignorance. We spend the remainder of the movie watching idiots fight off their caretakers, put the lives of all humanity in danger, and beat a hasty path back to earth, which, by any reasonable standards, is in no way ready for a deposit of spoiled, needy, skill-less blobs. As a moral fable, Wall-E would like to be teaching us to consider how our current actions will affect future generations, and to occasionally forgo instant gratification with deference to planning and reflection. Lesson learned? Hardly.

to create or intimate

I’m not really afraid of my life slipping into mundaneness. It’s inevitable. I’m just not an ambitious person. I like spending time alone, I like spending time with friends, and I’m just very comfortable doing nothing of importance. I don’t need to be recognized or powerful or even important, but even without these needs I’m not free from anxiety about the direction of my life by any means. Transitioning out of the school year and having a lot of free time brings these thoughts to the fore frequently throughout the day, as I try to convince myself to be productive. Generally, I fail at this objective, but at least in the past few minutes I’ve clarified some of my own motivations to myself. My life has been relatively easy on me, due to inborn talents, and as a result it’s taken me a long time to face the realization, or even just the possibility, of disappointment. Even more than failing at my chosen career path, these are the two ongoing failures that scare me the most:

First, I want to create meaningful art. Not graphic art, that ship sailed a long time ago. But I want to create music or words that express what I feel is trapped just under the surface. As far as music, I’ve been in the process of making lots and lots of excuses to myself to explain why I haven’t made a solid dent on something yet. I can speak through a couple different instruments, but I just haven’t thought of anything to say.

As far as writing, I know I understand things. I understand a lot of things that other people don’t understand. Yes, with regards to objective knowledge like math that is easy to express once your brain is wrapped around it, I can understand it and relate that understanding and that’s where I’ve found success. But I also believe that I understand other things about the world and people and their interactions and motivations, but only in a fleeting way and I am frustratingly unable to formulate that understanding in a meaningful way, even to myself. As I indicated a year ago in my first post, this is the reason for this blog.

In support of this diagnosis, it occurred to me why I’ve always been incapable of editing my own work. When I reread things I’ve written, even just seconds ago, the original meaning is lost to me, and it just frustrates me to rewrite things. No, writing is not my future. At least, not without a lot more practice.

The second preoccupation of mine is to find true intimacy, and I think this desire ties in closely with the first one. For someone else to truly understand me would be the same as creating meaningful art. I’m not sure exactly how to explain it, but it could be as simple as confirming that I am the person I imagine myself to be. I don’t think its impossible.

If this entry has a reflective tone, it’s not a depressed one; I hooked up with a new girl last night, a girl I met last weekend, and I actually think achieving some percentage of that intimacy I’ve been talking about might be possible. She’s funny, scatterbrained, perceptive, challenging, open, unpretentious, and smart, and not a bad fuck either. I’m going to make an honest effort, I swear.

Why do I think I’m better than that?

Why do I think I’m better than that?

E7200 PC Build Update – Overclocking

This is a follow-up to my recent post where I detailed my purchasing decisions for my PC upgrade.

Everything is great!  I took everything out of my old case, cleaned it and started from scratch building.  Some fun things I did before it got up and running:

-Since I planned to use my old graphics card I decided to clean it out.  In order to accomplish that, I ripped the metal plate off of the heatsink with a pair of pliers, and cleaned out all the dust.  Then I decided that the metal plate probably helped air flow, so I attached an aluminum foil replacement with two-sided adhesive.  Unfortunately, the graphics card is a noise disaster.  I don’t think its the foil, but since all my other parts are nearly perfectly silent, the noise alone is making me consider upgrading the card as well (or perhaps on-board video?)

-I love my six year old microsoft natural keyboard, so I decided to take it apart and give it a cleaning.  Taking it apart was fun and informative, but getting it back together was… an adventure.  It took at least an hour and some creative duct taping inside to get everything to stay in place but I managed to pull it off.  My roommate owes me $.50 for my success.

Other than that the process has been as smooth as possible.  The only frustrating moment came when I realized that there’s only 1 IDE connector and my DVD drive and old hard drive would have to be connected together, but I sorted that out.  I managed to get everything plugged in correctly the first time, Vista loaded up perfectly, and I was up and running.

Overclocking worked as advertised!  Oddly, the default setting on the CPU was a 8.5 multiplier @ 267, even though the official 2.53 GHz mark requires a 9.5 multiplier.  I adjusted this and set the FSB to 333, getting up to 3.15 GHz, and everything booted normally.  Almost…

I used Prime95 for stress testing and was failing.  I busted out Gigabytes included tweaking software to diagnose.  Thankfully my CPU was staying under 53 C under full load, even with stock cooling, so things seemed to be ok there.  Checking out the overclocking options, however, I noticed that the memory speed was set to 999 MHz.  I recalled reading that the memory speed should be double the FSB speed in DDR2, and besides, my memory was only rated for 800.  Adjusted that setting down, rebooted, and passed Prime95 with flying colors.

In addition, I used PassMark to benchmark my CPU.  A score of 1977 put me essentially in stock Phenom 9600 range, AMD’s mid-range quadcore processor, which goes for about $250.  Yay!

Considering that I’m only bothering to overclock to levels attainable with default voltages and stock cooling, operating at safe temperatures, this result has me overjoyed.  Now to install Cubase and see what I can pull off.

Finally writing about sex again: a tribute to SP

Ambivalence towards my sexual partners became somewhat of a theme that correlated with my decreased posting activity. It’s not that I get bored with every girl I meet, see, it’s just that I get bored with the ones who are willing to have sex with me. Saturday night was a new high/low watermark in the saga of my sexual achievement/indifference. The tale goes a little like this…

About two months ago I had just been just friended by TCNC. I was not happy about this, as the combination of personal enthusiasm and achieved intimacy in the relationship had me fairly optimistic about the future. But this is what happens. The next weekend I am out at a bar and strike up a rousing conversation with a fairly attractive blond girl who was part of our party. A common interest in rival baseball teams drove a conversation to the point where it was clear that we wanted to have sex with each other. Then we did. Frequently. We’ll call her SP, for slam-piece.

Let’s count the ways that she has been functionally perfect. First, nice body. Off to a good start. Second, she makes no emotional demands on me whatsoever. No complaints there. Third, she orgasms just from sex. I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that. Foreplay? No thanks, just the D, thank you. But again, the ambivalence.

Finally, Saturday. I’m meeting a friend at a bar for his birthday party, and SP shows up. I keep expecting my encounters with her to be awkward, in retribution for my frequent avoidance of her in the online chatting and etc. However, this never happens; she’s always nice, always genuinely happy to see me, and always finding a way to subtly remind me that there’s a nice warm place to bury my penis, if I so desire. What a great girl! Still, I’m restless. Feeding off of my friends who have a strict no-approach policy, I obsess in a minor way over my lack of motivation to meet and greet, and spend way more time dancing awkwardly with my friends (yes some girls) than is healthy. We leave for another bar. Without SP. She meets us there. I realize I have to go back to bar one (to meet friends I inadvertently stiffed), and walk back. Without SP. (OK, so I’m no chivalrous hero in todays story). More awkward dancing with friends, more not approaching, although I do get roped into long intense conversations with a couple girls I had previously met. Not interested. As the bar is closing up, I go downstairs… and of course, there’s SP.

On the way back to my place she’s genuinely sweet, again. We have a coy jokey conversation about my lack of emotional investment and how sporting she has been, and then we fuck. She spends the night for the first time, and it’s actually kind of nice. This is the kind of girl people marry, folks. So what’s my deal? Ideally I could wrap this up in a 100 calorie fun pack, but this is the best I can do: my karma is seriously fucked. It’s not that I’m actually treating her poorly; she knows exactly what’s going on, even if we never talk about it, because she’s a smart girl. But, as they say in Texas, just ’cause no one’s getting hurt, that don’t make it right. (I’m not sure they say that)

Unrelated Observation #1: This girl came up to me and my friend to tell him he looked like John Krasinksi, which he definitely does (”My friends and I were wondering if anyone’s ever told you…”). Her main problem was that she was not attractive, but her second main problem was that she was extremely apologetic about the whole thing. For the love of God, if you’re going to go up and hit on someone, don’t repeatedly apologize and insist that you’re not looking for a boyfriend. It’s just embarrassing.

Unrelated Observation #2: I need at least one friend who will give me some moderate goading to go up and talk to girls, even if they’re not willing to do it themselves. I have no problem talking to girls. But I’m just awkward enough that if my friends are not going to back me up in any way the doubt starts creeping in and I don’t do it.

$500 PC Build: Core 2 Duo E7200

First of all, my sincere apologies if you were trying to find reliable information on some of these components and the whimsy of google sent you to my blog. I am neither an expert nor a real hobbyist; however, every few years I decide to upgrade my computer and it is inevitably cheaper for me to update the build I’ve been working on for the past six years rather than buy a boxed system. Without further ado, here are the results of my triennial foray into pc building.

Obviously, the first constraints to be considered are the budget for the project, and the goals to be reached within that budget. I decided I had about $500 to spend. As for my needs, a few things make this project slightly unusual. First of all, my xbox 360 is currently serving my high-end gaming needs so for the time being I will try to make do with my GeForce 6600GT graphics card, which was only middle of the road when I bought it this time in 2006. Second, my primary interest at this point with the computer is in music production. As such I decided to focus on processor performance and memory. Finally, I have been well-served my newegg.com in the past in terms of price, speed, and customer service, so I decided I buy all my components there to make my life a little easier.

Component 1: CPU

the CPU was the only logical place to start my search, especially with a GPU out of the picture. In the past I have found $100 to be my sweet spot for processors so through a few simple google searches I found two early contenders: the Intel Core 2 Duo E2160, and the AMD X2 5000+. My past two processors have been AMD, so that’s where I gravitated first, and the 5000 seemed to be the budget sweet spot. However the more I read the more it became apparent that with a little overclocking the core 2 duos could produce much bigger bang for the buck than the AMD chips. Starting with the E2160, hailed as a “budget champion” I then realized my budget could support a stronger CPU and discovered a brand new chip with the 45nm architecture, the E7200. At $131, with strong reviews and apparently easy overclocking, I felt like I had a solid choice

Choice: Intel Core 2 Duo E7200: $131

Component 2: Mainboard

When I updated two years ago Gigabyte had emerged as a great choice for quality budget mainboards, and as far as I can tell that is still the case, although Asus had a competitive offering as well. The two newest chipsets for the Core 2 Duos are the X38 and X48, but the budget choices in those categories are lacking. As far as I could determine, the P35 chipset is the next best thing and actually offers comparable performance to the newer chipsets. It was fairly easy to narrow my choice to two boards: the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS2L and the Asus P5K SE. The gigabyte features solid-state capacitors and what appeared to be superior overclocking options, except for one glaring problem: the DSL2 for which I read reviews has been replaced by the GA-EP35-DS2L, an identical board with a power saving utility added. As far as I can tell the utility disables the option to make adjustments to the cpu voltage, which limits overclocking options. I nearly went with the P5K, but switched back after making the following considerations. First, I am fairly conservative overclocker, and from the reviews it appears the E7200 is capable of a 25% overclock to 1333 (333×4) FSB without adjusting the core voltage. Second, I might actually benefit from the power saving features, and third, that if I decided down the road I needed extra power it may still be possible to disable the power saving features and boost the voltage (at this point I couldn’t dig up a conclusive statement one way or the other).

Choice: Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS2L $89.99

Component 3: Memory

My first idea here was what seemed to be a fantastic featured deal on newegg: a 2 GB G.Skill pair marked down from $99.99 to $59.99. However after a little bit of research it became apparent that the DDR2 1066 rating on this set would be superfluous. Again, I am speaking only from second-hand research, but it seems that overclocking the memory beyond synchronous speeds is superfluous. In other words, if I boost my E7200 to a 333 FSB (or 1333, because something multiplies it by 4 somewhere) then the memory only needs to operate at 667 (again, some multiplier working here) for an essentially maximal experience. With that in mind I found Corsair XMS2 2 GB pairs for $29 after mail-in rebate. I haven’t been following component prices, but this seems like an incredibly good deal. A day after I placed the order for everything, I realized it would be insanity not to get another set (now bumped up to $31 after rebate), ending up with 4 GB. If I had realized at the time I would be buying 4 GB I might have considered the 2×2 set marked down to $82, but I certainly can’t complain about what I ended up with. Word of warning: after I made the purchase I stumbled across some comments indicating that they may be using lower quality components than previously. If I had spent more I’d be worried.

Choice: 4 GB: 4×1 Corsair XMS2 1GB DDR2 800 $60

Operating System

Thanks to university licensing I was able to save on an OS purchase the last two times I built, but this time around I’m taking the plunge and buying a windows product. Not really thrilled about it. There were some serious choices to be had here. Vista vs. XP, OEM vs retail, and 32 bit vs. 64 bit. None of the three were easy. I settled on Vista mostly through consensus of scanned reviews and security info that I could find. OEM might have been the wrong choice but with retail at double the price, even if I need to buy again when I upgrade I’ll still be breaking even. Not to mention that when that time comes I may want to upgrade to 64 bit. This was the choice that gave me the most trouble. The 32 bit OS means I’m pushed right to the memory max, but on the other hand compatibility will not be an issue. Frankly I had a bad experience trying to install Windows XP 64 two years ago and it probably impacted my decision. I have no 64 bit apps on the horizon any time soon, so I settled on:

Choice: Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 32-bit OEM – $99.99

Final Build:

CPU: C2D E7200 $130

MB: GA-EP35-DS2L $90

RAM: Corsair XMS2 4×1 GB $60

HD: WD Caviar 320GB $70

OS: Vista 32-bit OEM $100

PSU: Seasonic S12 II 380W $70

Total: $520

Well, I hope you enjoyed the rundown of the major choices I made for my system. The PSU may have been excessive but I went with a cheap one last time and my system had frequent problems with overheating, so I decided to make an investment on quality (and quiet!) this time around. Obviously that could be brought under $50 to bring us under budget.  As for other components, I bought an external sound interface a few months ago, I have a nice LCD monitor, I’m sticking with my 6600GT for the time being, and my case has nostalgia value. If you have feedback on any of my choices, I’d love to hear it; the parts are in the mail and there’s still time for me to switch

Metaphor

I stood at the top of the stairway, grasping for a door that wasn’t there. It was pitch black; as the last one to turn in, I had turned out all the lights before heading to bed. Bedrooms, of course, are normally upstairs, and, usually, when I visit home, I stay in one of the upstairs bedrooms. In fact, my older brother occupied this bedroom in my parents’ house the fall I went off to college, and I had not made the night-time journey down to the basement bedroom in over six years.

In the light, everything looks different than it did then, of course. The kitchen has been redone, the carpet on the stairway replaced, the bedroom repainted and rearranged. But in the darkness, I know this place; my hands know this place. Even after six years, I know exactly where to grab and where to step. I moved methodically through the kitchen; hand on the counter, then on the fridge, then on the door frame. I grab the door frame with one hand while the other reaches for the door. Once I find the door, I know from experience, I can get down the stairs easily, even in the pitch darkness. Except… where is it?

The door was taken down, of course, four years ago. When it first strikes me, the moment, I think how odd it is that the place has changed in the way it has. But if I had been here, then a new table here, a door there, would not be so much. It is me that has changed, and if I’m grasping for a door that is four years gone, then perhaps whatever else it is that I’m grasping for, coming home like this, is years gone as well.

Essential Greeting Cards

Lets just get this out there