Dear Pixel, age 23,

The trope is to say something like,

“I wouldn’t skip any of the adversity I had to face, because that made me who I am today. And I like myself.”

Luckily, I don’t have that problem. I don’t like myself. I’m a tool. I’d love to do whatever I could to change that. Only I don’t know if the problem is that I’ve been through too much adversity or not enough.

Seeing as how I don’t like the things you’re about to do, I might as well take the ‘more pain’ route to future happiness. Who knows? Maybe next year I’ll be able to write that silly trope to you.

So here’s how to really mess up your life in just one year. This includes lots of stuff you will do and some stuff that you just might do.

• Plan to live with lots of people, even if you don’t know who they are or if this will happen.  Money is just a silly fake thing anyway, right?
• If you find a girl that cares about you a lot, act aloof and ignore her.  This will only bring about positive, reasoned results.
• If, however, you find a girl that is distant and pulling away, pay as much attention to her as you can.  Forget all past wrongs, just focus on not losing her now.
• When you think things might hurt people, keep them hidden and lie about them for as long as possible.
• Don’t wear a seat belt: it chafes your mentionables.
• Sign up for every interesting class you can regardless of how much free time you think you’ll have.  This will let you succeed wildly.
• Stick it in crazy.
• Start lots of projects
• Pleasure and business go well together.
• Play video games.  You know, to relax.
• Even if you really can’t do something, fake it for a long time until someone calls you out on it.
• Be nice to strangers.
• You can trust yourself.  Your convictions will never waver, no matter how tempting something is.
• Drink, like, all the time.
• Don’t meet people from outside the department.
• Get attached quickly and fiercely.
• Punch an elderly person.
• Go abroad as often as you can.
• Let things get weird between you and the people you care about.
• Never give up.
• Rob a liquor store.
• Just admit it, you’re probably gay.

Good luck with that.  Seriously.

… I hate you,

– Pixelation Qyw Styx, age 24, ©2010

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Emotional Faithfulness

I’m not saying I buy ‘emotional cheating,’ but let’s say I did. Even if it truly existed, absence of emotional cheating would not equal emotional faithfulness. There’s a gulf between emotional cheating and emotional faithfulness.

Emotional cheating is when you no longer love the person you are with exclusively.  Let us define it as such and worry about ‘love’ later.  It is often contrasted with physical cheating.  But there is another, orthogonal contrast.  And this is between emotional cheating and emotional faithfulness.

Let’s ignore bivalent logical systems and consider the senses of ‘emotional cheating’ and ‘emotional faithfulness’ rather than the exact denotation.  Because in standard logic, of course not emotionally cheating will equal emotional faithfulness.  QED.

Consider the case in which someone is unfaithful physically but claims to have been faithful emotionally.

I would argue that such a case is impossible.

Assuming the sex was consentual, it was not an open relationship, and the person did not forget they were with you, then they consciously decided to sleep with someone they did not love that was not the person they loved.  But what can this sense of emotional love be if one is so callous with their physical body?  The idea is that if one is willing to do something like that, then it could not have been the sort of love that would put the other person above themselves.  And if it’s not that sort of love, then what is the sense in even talking about them being emotionally faithful?  Their emotions are obviously impoverished.

But suppose, on the other hand, that it is that sort of love and their emotions are not impoverished.  Then by being willing to physically cheat, they demonstrated that they did not truly love the person they were with.  At least not at that moment.  And if this is the case, then the consequences are even worse: because now it is a sporatic love.

I have sympathy for such people, but it is not sympathy worthy of a relationship.  I build my relationships with a solid foundation of trust.  When that gets knocked down, I don’t try to repair it, I scrap it and start anew somewhere else.. no matter how much it sucks.

Because if you don’t have trust, what do you really have left?

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Personality Crushes

Have you ever met one of those people that you just can’t get enough of?  They may not be the funniest or the smartest or the most charming, but you’re always excited when you see them and always enjoy talking to them?

I don’t mean general friends here.  I love hanging out with my friends.  When I need to see a movie or a ride to the airport, they’re always there.  I enjoy the time I spend with them and look forward to events that will bring us together in the future.  But these people are people that you begin to miss when they’re not around.  People that make your life warmer and so you want to seek them out constantly.  I call them personality crushes.

I’ve met a few people like that in my life.  Some have been my friends and I lived with one once, but mostly they’re just friendly acquaintances you can’t see all that often.  There might be a correlation with that: if you saw them enough you’d be more likely to stop thinking of them as special.  But I think the biggest factor is the fact that almost all of the people we’ve ever met aren’t in our current social circle.   So there’s a lot of lame people you don’t see anymore, but there’s also a few of these personality crushes.

I always wonder about whether I’m someone else’s personality crush.  I mean, I know I have been.  People have told me almost as much in the past.  But because I didn’t have a word for it then, I just smiled and went on with my life.  Which sucks, if you think about it, because that means that I don’t often reciprocate other people’s personality crushes.

I guess that’s the way the numbers have to work out.  It just sucks that that’s the case, doesn’t it?

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2008 Off Paper

At the end of the year, I usually write a post in which I go over the previous year’s resolutions and compare whether I’ve achieved them or not.

Back in 2005, I wrote a post I still think about called “remember when…” in which I recalled the mini-adventures that may or may not have made it onto the blog, but still reminded me of very cool events.

I repeated it in 2006, because that also seemed like another chapter of my life being closed (though, when I get my actual memoirs published, it’ll end with a dinosaur fight rather than a blog post).  I didn’t do it at all in 2007, because all it felt like I did that year was try to get 150 hugs.  I succeeded, but at what cost?  Indeed, I ended up calling this year 2007 pt. 2 because I felt like I hadn’t accomplished anything worth writing in the previous year.

So…  here’s 2008 as I remember it. I’ve also included 2007, but that could really just be summed up as work, travel, hugs, visits, and grad school apps.

• Applications to grad school and the bitter torture of waiting.
• The first death of a friend I’ve had to deal with in my adult life.
• I had blue hair.
• Sadly, people I wanted to respect me got to see it.
• Anson looked like Trotsky.
• I kissed three people I should not have and not a single person I should have. 
• I was punched.  In the FACE.  By a fat man.  Sadly, this was still not one of the top three worst days of 2008.
• I had the absolute worst 12-hour period in my life.   I would not wish that day on my worst enemy…. And, because of promises and such, I can never say why to anyone.  Ever.
• I got into Fucking DUKE!
• I moved in with an old, rich lady with very large dogs that would always bark when I came home.
• … and she sort of fell in love with me.
• Skype chats
• E-mail exchanges
• Three months of vacation
• A week away in an awesome mansion
• Visiting T-Rob.
• Living alone
• Going out drinking on weekends with a few good buds.
• Driving, ugh.
• Helping far too many people move.
• Getting to see people that truly matter.
• Meeting all the other fabulous people here.
• Getting involved in USP.
• The three-day campout for basketball tickets.
• Dancing.
• Far too many people falling for me.  *sigh*
• Thursday foodin’
• “Spot the Logical Fallacy” parties
• “Buzzword Bingo”
• Helping the blind
• Hurting the deaf
• Tutoring in maths
• Applying to graduate school and feeling miserable doing it.
• Trying to collect hugs.
• Visiting everyone I cared about, worried it would be the last time I’d see any of them.
• Being right about one of them.
• B-ball games
• Drinking coffee just to see a cute girl
• Work ponchos
• Reassessing life again and again
• Being funny again, being creative again, but being unable to dedicate time to it.
• Snowboarding
• Finals
• The scariest presentations of my friggin’ life.
• Finding out I was an introvert in situations where I’m afraid I’ll look foolish.
• Bad sweater parties
• Moving away without telling people: multiple times
• NaNoWriMo, oh no!
• NaBloPoMo times so many months.
• Twitter!
• Visiting exes
• Going camping
• Getting a GPS
• Losing moneys and material goods and not caring
• Magnetic fields
• Tightrope walking with people’s emotions

…  I’m forgetting a thousand things.

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100 Things about Me, pt. 100 of 100

100. I have no middle name, but the middle letters of my first and last name are “arlo” “arisca.” That amuses me because it over emphasizes the a’s.

For the previous one hundred posts, I posted one new fact about me just so that you could get to know me better. I hope it helped. If I missed anything you want to know, let me know, I’ll go rewrite some of the 80s and 90s. They were pretty lame. Comments and complaints are appreciated.

Note: I wrote this post three months ago, if some new fact about me came up since then, it is not reflected in this 100 things about me list.

Last Year: Ramadancing!
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