Moved

I have moved.  It was a simple experience.  All I had to do was divide all my things roughly in half and then half again, keep the quarter and remove the rest one way or another.  As I said simple.  I could have reduced a little bit more except I felt that I would be betraying two thirds of my life if I could not at least give my old Roleplaying stuff away to another home, but it was either throw it away or move with it.  So move with it I did.  

Why did I move?  I moved because I was lonely.  MPTR had her chance and I gave her three years more to decide, granted I was mad at her for most of it, but then I think I had good reason to be.  I had a couple good friends and a smattering of acquaintances, but no one who would fell the gap that was left by MPTR, and I tried.  I had a good job where I was appreciated, if only by a few of the staff members, and I could do good work, but whose owners were seeking the maximum income from it while at the same time driving away business.  The truth of work was that the owners were looking to sell the business in the next five or less years and when that happened I would be looking for work anyways.

I was seeking to live with a family with children who love me.  I love them.  There are more prospects in the city for me to find love and well I wont be alone.

But.  The room that I am living in has changed from what I first agreed to live in.  First there were walls and a bathroom.  Then the bathroom left, but that was okay.  Then the walls left and were to be replaced with bookshelves.  I moved and the bookshelves have not materialized, but they will not be my bookshelves, my bookshelves are not good enough for the space.  My utilitarian ideas that furniture need to have two or more purposes to exist have been quashed. And I have been told that I need two or three new pieces of furniture that only have one use to accomplish my needs.  

To me a bookshelf is not just a place to put books.  A good bookshelf can hold books or folded clothing, it can serve as a small desk to place a laptop and the front can have wall coverings like a poster or two.  

They don't want my stuff to be in my space.  They want there to be space in my space.  I mean lots of open space in my space.  I have never had open space.  My bed sits against one wall of their family room.  There is a ca couch and a bunch of chairs and a large television in it too.  It is a bed in their space.  They have a table in the pace that is supposed to be mine, but I can't really put my legs under it and I certainly can't put boxes under it either.  The floor is nice, but it feels like I have to be extra careful.  The ceiling lights for the basement are controlled at the top of the stairs and are in my space as well as to common space.

Each of the family members has their space, with walls and doors that contains some of there personal stuff.  The rest of their house contains their stuff too.  I want to tell them that thanks for giving me space to put my things in, but if I can't have my stuff in that space, it really isn't my space.  It is me conforming to their space.  And maybe that is something I am willing to do, because I am so really lonely.  

My friend GardenerGuru tells me that she is going to miss me a lot.  I mean A LOT.  Our relationship has developed into something very similar to marriage, but without the living together and the conjugal benefits, we share and trust each other implicitly, but she needs to see me once a week and I need someone more than once a day.  MPTR needs me more than she will admit.  She is currently surviving with her boyfriend who psychologically abuses her and who physically abuses her children while simultaneously threatening to take her children away from her.  She needs me to provide her support so she can realize that she has legs that can support herself.  She needs me to help her feel smart and sexy.  She needs me to talk to and confirm that she is right.  I needed her for all those things, but I needed her to take the first step, but she could not, not for the four years I waited, because she is More Passive Than Rain.  

I forgot that the Big Smoke has a reputation, around the world, for having the most stuck up women.  I mean, they are looking for everything and won't settle for less.  They want their man to be, fit, wealthy, principled and good looking, but at the same time do not have to meet those same qualifications.  In short they are superficial.  Not all of them, just enough of them.  So, while there are a lot less women who think beer drinking contests and back country mud spraying are great first dates, there are going to be the same number of first dates in my future, because: I don't have or want a car, while clearly overweight but who can still do  a sustained 40kph on a bike for over an hour the over weight part makes me not fit, and the principled part actually does take a back seat to the other stuff because zeros on a paycheck matter more than being able to talk after sex or before it even.  I may just be a little discouraged, because although I am living in the City, I am in the burbs, so I am not close enough.  I miss SuperGirl.  I have been thinking a lot about her for a week now.  I have been thinking about Seven too.  I have been thinking about PolyGirl and MagicEyes.  I have been thinking about India, I am living about five to ten kms from where I last knew she was living and although I will never impose my presence on her, I think about her.

I have to buy single use furniture that I do not want, with money I do not have in the next week so that I can fit into my friends's perception of what I should live like.

Drake Equation 2.0

The Drake Equation is this nice little theoretical way of trying to figure out how many intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations there are in the galaxy.  The equation goes like this:

N=R*fp*ne*fl*fi*fe*L

Most of these numbers are Unknown so it makes the entire equation impossible to churn out an answer.  And there are a few flaws in the equation.  The equation which you can get on Wikipedia.  R is the rate of new star formation per year, fp is the fraction that have planets, ne is the average number of plants that could habour life per star with planets, fl the fraction of planets that could have life that develop life, fi is is the fraction of planets that develop life that develop civilizations, fe is the fraction of those that learn broadcast their intelligence off their planet and L is the lifespan of that civilization before they destroy themselves or die out.

Most of these numbers are not known, but a few of them are known and can provide numbers, like how many stars are born every year in our galaxy can be estimated.  Thanks to Kepler, the planet finding telescope, we have an idea of how plentiful planets are.  From the various plant surveys we have an idea of how many may support life.  But the rest is still speculation.  We have not discovered life or evidence for life on Mars yet so of the three planets in the habitable zone of our sun, only one has life, but it is theoretically possible on Mars as well as two or more of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

There are problems with this equation.  Like a few Years ago, North America and bits of Europe went dark according to the Drake Equation.  We stopped broadcasting most our television signals thought the air and began exclusively sending them through wires.  It is more energy efficient to do it that way and so it costs less, but if you were watching from really far away and did not understand the warnings, you might assume there was a global war and most of the people were wiped out.  If there were technological species out in the galaxy, how long before their civilizations did what we did?  Not long. They might not have ever broadcast their communications through the air.  

That is one problem.  Another problem is that the basis of the equation is the star formation rate in the galaxy.  The problem with this is that all stars could develop planets, in the habitable zone and could start life, but not all the stars would last that long.  The large stars would burnout and possibly explode before life could get a foothold, other stars could allow life to begin before snuffing it out.  The oldest fossils on Earth are from the first billion years, so if the star lasted less than a billion years, life may not have even formed.  It took another three billion years for the explosion of life forms that we see to day to begin, so we could say that complex life would require a star to last four billion years for complex life to evolve and another five hundred million to develop intelligence, well our level of intelligence.  So assuming we were fast or slow or just average should we require a star to last at least five billion years.

There are other necessities for life.  A magnetic field is required unless life can only exist beneath the waves.  For a magnetic field you require a couple other things, lots of iron for one.  Our magnetic field is caused by the rotation of a liquid metal core, Jupiter has a magnetic core caused by the rotation of its liquid metallic hydrogen core.  Mercury has a ver weak magnetic field, cause by the slow rotation of its solid metal core.  Mars does not have a magnetic field, its core went solid millions of years ago and if there was life there, it died.  So although there are trace metals in out bodies, we rely on planets formed from metal rich surroundings, so planets with around metal poor stars are poor candidates for life and therefore intelligent life.  So we should ignore all the stars that are too old too.

The problem that I thought of was one that my astronomy teacher brought up twenty or so years ago.  He stated that living near a supernova is really bad for your life.  He stated that the force of a supernova could strip an atmosphere at 100 light years distant.  I did some quick calculations based on a few known facts, 1) the size of the galaxy, 2) the rate of supernovas in our galaxy and 3) the volume of space affected assuming 100 LY radius of distruction.  Supernovae occur about 2.5 per century.  Over 500 million years that is a lot, about 125 million.  The size of the galaxy in cubic light years is very, very huge, but so is a sphere with a radius of 100 LY.  Divide the two numbers and you get how many supernovae would have and divide the supernovas by that number and you get the number of supernovae that occurred within 100 LY of any given location assuming even dispersion of supernovae.  And the number is… 152!!

So I checked the number of 100 LY destruction and my professor may have been using hyperbole to create impact.  Some scientists suggest that you need to be within 33 LY of the supernovae, so 1/3 the radius = 1/27th the volume or about 6 supernovae within that distance over 500 million year for any given point.  Some suggest within 10 LY will destroy a planet, plug in those numbers and you get 15% chance that a supernova was within 10 LY of any given point.  This assumes that there star densities are equal all through the galaxy; it isn't.  There are more stars in the core than where we are, 500 times as many stars per given volume.  So life most likely would not evolve in the center region of our galaxy and depending on how close is too close, supernovae might have rebooted the process on any given planet.

Dwarf stars, of which our Sun is one, but I mean the Red Dwarfs, the truly small stars.  They have a very narrow habitable zone, because they do not produce a lot of light and therefore the planets are cooler further away and because they are smaller, the stars are less stable early in life, for several billion years they have massive coronal mass ejections and flares that could potentially wipe out potential life.  After that time period, life is good around those stars for much longer than life would be around our Sun, the star would last up to ten times as long, but the magnetic field of a planet only lasts as long as the core remains liquid and the rotation rate is relatively fast — the closer to a solar mass the faster a planet will become tidally locked, like Mercury and the closer moons of Jupiter and Saturn, as well as our own moon.

So how about a new Drake Equation?

N the number of planets with life and therefore potential intelligent life

I the fraction of stars with more than the minimum metal required

M the fraction of stars between 1.25 and 0.5 solar masses

A the fraction of stars older than 4 billion years

S the chance of cosmic disaster (proximate supernovae etc.) this excludes core stars as the risk becomes too high

P the percentage chance of moons and rocky planets in the habitable zone between 0.7 and 5 Earth masses

L the chance that life will evolve, could be 100% could be less.

N=I*M*A*S*P*L

If life starts, I would think it would start to evolve.  If it evolves some sort of photosynthesis would evolve, oxygen using life forms can get bigger than non-oxygen using life.  The reason why I used 4 billion years old stars was to allow for the emergence of oxygen using organisms.

The size of the star, is important too.  The bigger a star is, the shorter its life, but also the sooner that it grows into its next stage.  What I mean is that when our sun first started up, it was not as bright as it is now and not as big either.  As it aged, it got bigger and its luminosity increased.  Larger stars get bigger faster and might get bigger faster than early life could evolve and that would be bad.  Smaller stars have the other problem already mentioned, increased instability.  The range I picked is not based on science, it is just an arbitrary number, but a good first start.

Witness

I was reminded of this a few days ago during a lucid heart to heart with a close friend.  My friend did not think I knew what they wanted, but I had known for years, a decade about at least.  What is the thing that men and women want?  If you do not know then you are too young to have contemplated it properly, but this is what you want, more than anything else.  Trust me, you want it and you are looking for it in the one you hold at night.  You may think you have it, I hope you do.

What you want more than anything else is a witness.  A witness to witness your life with you.  Someone that you can talk about what happened this day the last and all the days after this one.  Your witness accepts everything that happens to you, the accept you.  They are not trying to change you, but they are there for when you change and when things happen to you.  Your witness is proof that you lived and existed, because as you know, unless people are always around you they do not appear to actually exist, so it is important that one does and that a record of your life remains.

The form that this person takes is not important, really, only that they do in fact exist, that they witness your life.  They could be your best friend or they could be your lover.  They could be both.  Once important thing is that you have a witness.

One day you will want this more than anything else.  When you have it you will want to fight for it to keep it.  

There are anew things that I am not certain about, like do you need a witness if you have children?  If you have children, then they are proof that you did exist. I am not sure if you need a witness if you have a child, that they may be your witness, but I suspect that you need another witness.

I need someone to share my life with, so that I can be sure that I am alive, these words you read, are they put here by your imagination?

Winter Fat Bike Riding

Winter is a time for most people to hang up their bicycles in Canada, unless you live on Vancouver Island or Vancouver itself.  Some brave people in other milder climes continue to bike because they are clearly crazy.  When I decided to get rid of my car last year, in the Summer, I knew that I would be joining that very elite and clearly insane group of people.  I did and I lived through one horrible Winter to make it to another.

In the Winter I drive a Winter Bike.  It is not really called a Winter Bike, but rather a beach bike.  The tires are wider than any bicycle that you have seen, they are closer to the size of motorized dirt bikes or a narrow motorcycle tire.  There is a lot of grip on these tires, so it is perfect for riding on a beach, in snow or of the trail.  The frame is heavy duty, so the bike looks very heavy.  It is a lot heavier than a traditional road bike so the manufacturers reduced the mass a little by cutting holes in the tire rims.  The other difference in this bike and the other bicycles I have owned is that the air pressure in the tires is quite low, between 8 and 20 psi is the recommended pressure.  As a comparison, air pressure at sea level is 16 psi.  So tire pressure is quite low.  

Last Winter was as cold as winters were twenty-five years ago, back when Climate Change was just a theory.  I rode my bike every other day in that weather and I learned a few things about bike riding in Winter.

Safety was my major concern, after all if I died, that would mean my Winter bike rides would be called into question.  I outfitted my bike with lots of reflectors and a head light, so on coming cars could see me and rear lights so cars behind me could see me too.  I also wore a lot of reflective clothing.  The lights and the reflective surfaces are because a lot of winter driving occurs at night as the days are so much shorter.  A helmet is still a must for me, I wore it over top of my hat.  I also had to be aware of my surroundings more because hype threat of wiping out is real when driving on icy roads and with cars around it means you have to recover quickly when you wipe out.  

Last year with the weather, an abundance of -30°C temperatures and I had to get my laundry done every week and groceries bought, so that meant I had to go out and ride in those temperatures.  The danger is not really the temperatures, it is the wind chill.  A 10km wind in the face is bad in -30° but when you are traveling at 30 km/h into the wind the wind is an effective 40 km/h, and the wind at that temperature and speed feels a lot colder.  So it is important to dress in the right cloths.  I typically wore a t-shirt with a sweater covered by a light jacket and the reflective coat, which had padding, four light layers is better than one heavy one and I often had to unzip the top layer and arrived at home every time wet with sweat.  I did not wear shorts in this bike, I wore pants and a waterproof rubber pant over top, there were three advantages to this choice.  The this layer trapped heat, the impervious material prevented wind chill and on the warmer days, car splashing did not soak my pants.

Footwear is important too, as it is difficult the wear layers with boots.  Good insulated boots work best, water proof is better, as the splash off the tires and the road way was considerable.   I wore insulated steel toed rubber boots, Bogs actually.  The wide and tall top allowed my to insert my pant leg and rubber pants inside and the seal was good enough to make my foot warm, and often hot.  

I don't ever ride on the sidewalks, but in the winter with the plows piling snow on the side the road way shrank over the winter and I noticed that the cars were extra cautious around me to the point I felt they were being unsafe to other drivers around me.  Also I was such a curiosity that drivers would stare as they past me, so when I can I take the back streets and use the sidewalks when ere are not too many pedestrians.  When the conditions are extra slippery the side walks are usually less so, or when I wipe out I am less likely to end up under a truck.

Air pressure is the unforeseen variable to Winter riding.  I like speed so I keep the pressure high, at twenty psi, but that means I am more likely to slip and wipeout and travel is next to impossible in deep snow.  In icy conditions and deep snow it is best to let the air out of your tires, eight psi means that when you are on the bike the tires are squashed flat and there is a much larger surface area on the road so travel in deep snow and icy roads is easier.  The one problem with that is speed and exertion.  Pedaling a bike with little air in the tire is a pot more work.  Normally the Fat Bike takes a lot more exertion to move than a road bike, but when there is little air in the tire it is a lot worse.  

There are other effects of owning a Fat Bike in the Winter time for travel.  The salt on the roads corrodes the tires quite quickly and you may need your hardware replaced after a single season.  However there are some advantages, when Spring and Summer bike season starts you are still used to riding so some of the ill effects of the first ride, or the first week of riding is missed: no saddle sores and no sore legs.  In fact the difficulty of riding in winter may mean you are a stronger rider than your cohorts earlier.

This Winter is looking like a warm one, like the ones that have been consistent since Climate Change has been a fact.  So I will be able to ride more in not -30°C weather, in addition because I am moving to the city, where there are more crazy people like me, I will get less stares.

The Cost of Ignoring the White Elephant

A lot of people would have you believe that Morals come from God.  That without God, humans would have no morals and we would be lawless animals, doing what ever comes to their mind, killing and raping.  I don't believe that.  I don't believe it because I am an atheist and I am a moral person.  I don't kill people, even when I think that they need to be be killed or rape even though I like someone an awful lot.  I believe that morality is innate and you learn it personally as you grow up.  I believe that when people kill it is an accident or the person is mentally ill.  Accidents happen and sometimes they happen because of carelessness on some level, whether it is because they were being careless when the accident occurred or someone was careless at some step that led up to the accident.  Carelessness is criminal when it causes death or injury, but sometimes accidents are unforeseeable and then they are not.  Sometimes people are injured or die because they are week, damaged, or simply on some level doing something that they should not be doing.

But sometimes there is death caused by mental illness.  Death by mental illness is actually very common.  There are people who are delusional with Schizophrenia and believe that someone is telling them to kill and there are psychopaths who have no conscience, sociopaths who have no connection with society.  But these mental illnesses are the poster boys of mental illness, but they are not the true killers; they represent the smallest fraction of all mental illness related killings, but they are sensational and they hit the public news media and movie screens with flash and glitter.

The big killer of mental illness is depression.  I would say that everyone knows of someone who has killed themselves.  Some nations have a suicide rate two or three times the murder rate.  Some populations within nations have suicide rates many times over the national rates of suicide.  Some nations suicide numbers are hidden, because suicide is shameful in their society; how likely is it that ceiling fan malfunctions are responsible for hundreds of deaths in South Korea?  Suicide is an expression of the worst of depression as a mental illness but not the most sensational.  Most suicide is private with no one to witness the event.  Killing yourself is a lot harder than people think, it is easier to hurt someone else than it is to hurt yourself.  Some people elect to get someone else to do the killing for them and the people that usually oblige are the police.  People often calling suicide by Cop.  It is simple, if you want to die pick up a knife and threaten a Cop and they will kill you for you.  But how do you get a cop to come and shoot you?  Commit a crime.  But not all crimes will get you killed, so you have to pick the right crime.  The right crime that will get you shot and killed most of the time is to threaten people with death.  

Lone gunman going out and killing a lot of people, in a school, in a work place, in a mall, never survive the experience, many of them kill themselves, but often they get shot several times by the police.  They are probably all depressed, certainly mentally ill.  Usually there is something that instigates the incident, work place murder sprees occur after the person has lost their job, in schools it is usually done by students.  These people are hoping to be stopped, some of them are hoping to die.  The media does not often talk a lot about the lone gunman that never fired a shot.  Mostly that come to their senses before they do anything and are unknown people.  They are mentally ill though.

Another twist to this type of "Lone Gunman" scenario has been the "I am an Islamic extremist" version.  Strangely not since 911, but since the prominence of Isis in the media and its specific threats towards western governments, but also the radicalization of troubled youth from all countries to Islam and Isis specifically but also other Islamic extremist groups, people have been claiming that they are fighting for them when they commit these acts.  It is a radical idea that these people are mentally ill and not extremist like they claim.  Most people want to believe that they are extremist for a couple of reasons.  Extremists are bad people.  Their existence justifies the massive amount of spending that governments have done to protect us from them over the years since 911 and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.  Mostly, though, because if people recognized that these people were mentally ill, then they would be our, collective, problem and would be our failing to society.  An extreme action such as murder and suicide is the last action of someone not getting the help that they need, that we do not provide.

Mental illness, is that special condition that no one talks about, even though it affects almost every family, every household and will affect almost every person at one or more parts of their life.  The old saying that, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, has never been more true.  How many more painting would Vincent  van Gogh have painted, how many books would Hemingway have written, Robin Williams acted in, how would Charlotte Dodge have impacted the world beyond her 16 year lifespan?  If you are reading this, you have spent time reading an argument from someone who wanted to die nearly twenty-one years ago enough to try.  

When the smoke had cleared from Sandy Hook public school and all the young bodies had been buried and people had time to examine what had happened there were two recommendations made: increase spending on mental health issues and institute more gun control.  And the anger and the debates started right away and people were angry and fighting across the airwaves and the Internet about how gun control was unconstitutional and everything else, but mental health spending was ignored, swept away.  We spend in North America, billions of dollars, trillions, on keeping everyone safe by locking people up.  We spend millions on mental health, but only millions.  If we spent a billion dollars on mental health the benefits to society would be huge.  More people employed, less people locked up, greater social acceptance for people with mental illnesses, less suicides.  Less parents walking into bathrooms and bedrooms and finding their beloved teenager dead.  No Sandy Hook tragedies, no Colombines. No Ecole Polytechnic.  

I don't mean that all terrorists are mentally ill, well actually I DO believe that all terrorists are mentally ill.  I think the process that turns people into soldiers is a process that allows them to kill, is a form of mental illness.  Whether the person is part of a terrorist organization or a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, they start out as regular people and are changed into people capable of killing by dehumanizing the enemy, which in polite society would be considered mentally ill.  You want to end the mental illness of war?  End the disparity between peoples, spend money to help them raise the level of their societies.  It would cost less than arming ourselves to fight them off and protect what we have from them getting it.  

Internet Security

Really?  Seriously?!?

With all the serious security Internet hacking of government and privat corporations, I am a little surprised.  Obviously the whole problem is foreseeable if people would just take a little thought about how to stop Internet hackers.  Well apparently they haven't.  I am no expert, but I have the answer and it is simple and a lot less expensive than what all these government and non government companies are doing.

The problem is that theses companies just have scaled up home computer security.  They rely on better hackers securing their system against the other hackers.  They rely on computer anti virus software to detect and quash attempts to invade their computers and their networks.  And that is the problem, because a network is only as strong as its weakest link and all networks have week links.  Weak because of old software, missed updates, old hardware and sloppy people.  And you can try to prevent all that from happening, but it is next to impossible.

There is a simple clear solution.  Actually a couple simple solutions on a theme.  And my solution is to stop your network from connecting to the network.  There are three ways that any company can do this, depending on the sensitivity of the business or information.  

First:

For high security networks such as government income tax information, spy agencies, police forces and Research and development companies, have two networks, one that connects to the Internet and one that does not.  If someone needs to work on the Internet, they use that computer and if they don't they work on that computer.  If they need to transfer information from one computer to the next the data needs to be moved physically.  The idea is to limit the hackers to hacking the public front and have the sensitive information locked behind a wall no hacker can hack across: physical space.

Second:

For medium security networks which are government and private companies and probably a number of banks that require Internet access to people's accounts and such, the one and a half networks approach. This is when you have one network split into two with a tiny computer network inbetween of two powerful computer s that specialize in fast data transfer.  Each network has one part of the pair included in it.  Every set period of time, a day or an hour or whatever the two computers isolate themselves from their networks and transfer updates and change sand when complete the computers sever the connection and rejoin their associated networks.  This won't stop malicious software programs from invading computers, but it would stopp real time hackers from getting information.  Both networks would require virus detection and prevention software, but the two connection captures would get the best of the best protection.

Third:

Low security or inexpensive networks.  If your business thrives on the Internet and you can't do without a connection for all computers and you are low security, you are probably also not a target for hackers.  Ofcourse you could make sure that your backup of your system is on a computer with no access to the Internet.  All your most sensitive information could be kept off the server and away from prying eyes.  Updates could be made when the business is closed and Internet access is shut off.  Simple and inexpensive.

With the concerns of Sony Pictures in the news and past hackers stealing social insurance numbers I thought that these agencies should wake up and get a clue.  A hacker can't hack a computer that is not on an accessible computer.

Partings

I find it difficult these last days in Smallville.  The days are like a dream where I am not in control.  Things are happening to me by me, but not by me.  It is an illusion, for I am in control, but it feels like it is not.  

The entire reason why I came back to Smallville was for a girl named MPTR and me leaving is saying good bye to her forever.  It is fitting that I was able to say good bye to her in person today.  The problem is that nothing ever goes smoothly.  She was extremely paranoid about meeting me, terrified that her boyfriend would find out.  She has been mentally terrified and psychologically bullied by him ever since he found out about us.  There is more than enough blame to go around on that one.

I should not have stepped into it.  I should have made it a requirement before I got involved with her that she be single, but love is a strange emotion that overrides all common sense.  He should have, upon finding us together have left her rather than what he did.  He is not happy and she is not happy and I am not happy.  She is most at fault, pursuing a second relationship without ending the first.  He did not choose to know that she was Polyamorous and know that that is what poly people do; they love more than one person.  I was at fault because I jumped into it without looking and I sabotaged my future to be with her.  A few short weeks after I sabotaged my life, I felt her betray me, not that she betrayed me, because I did not really understand her poly nature too.  

She loves.  She loves more than one man.  She loves more than one woman.  She loves them all at the same time, for her I think because she is afraid to say goodbye.  Her love and mine that we shared was not extinguished and it was not betrayed, it was just put on hold.  It is still there, waiting for someone to blow on the embers and bring it to life.

Today she came to my house and she stepped into my arms and we embraced and we held each other like we could not for so long.  We did not rut.  We could have, when I am in her presence I am always ready, but she was super paranoid and I knew it would be too much for her.

When I first met her I had a different view of women and what I was interested in.  I thought breasts were the neatest things about women, how they had shape without bones or muscle.  I thought that breasts were the most attractive feature of a woman, I did not understand bums or legs, long or short hair, it was boobs and tits for me.  She had virtually none and still I was besotted.  Breasts were something that the porn industry emphasized and I consumed their ideas, but a rarely noticed them on friends, instead I looked them right in the eye every time.  

You see I am not really a breast man, I am a brain man, but with porn I am a breast man, even though I know they hold my interest not.  I am told that breasts are very important.  They are a superficial way to get to know a woman; they are a stand in for personality when you can't ever get to know them, them the person.  Let me describe my lady love.  She is vulnerable and she is intelligent.  She is sensual and she will soak up all the love that you can give her.  People say that she has a pretty face, but I can't see it, I don't see it because I only have eyes for her brain.  Her chest is flat and her belly a mess of stretch marks, testament to two children and poor health, but I don't see it.  I see none of it.

It was good to be with her one last time, for only an hour, a very short hour.  We came together like we had not been apart.  As if the intervening time had not happened.  It will not happen again, but it was no true ending, a final pause.  She will go on with her boyfriend, whom she fears and he with her, a woman who he does not trust and needs to constantly punish and I who must go on and see if there is room for someone else in my heart.

…

I have a house that is quickly emptying.  The other day I had a local charity come by and pick out what they want for sale and they chose a few very heavy pieces, but left a few other very heavy pieces: a couch and a table, a few other smaller pieces.  There are two mattresses and two bed frames that need to go and a few other chairs an old computer and other stuff.  I need to load them up and remove them to a garbage dump in one load.  I need to do it soon.  My father wants to help, but I am loathe to ask for his help.  He is strong but he is old too.  I don't want him hurt.  But I don't see who else I can ask.  I am trying to keep my move as quite as possible.  I want to sneak out like a robber in the night.

My house seems empty with only a few things gone.  My room is half packed up.  I guess tomorrow I shall move into the other room and dismantle my old room.  Clean up the kitchen.  De-clutter the rest.  And I have given myself ten days to move.

Drought Part II

Poverty is not just about money, there are more than one area to be poor in.  I am poor relationship wise.  I have perhaps, not enough friends for my liking, but without a doubt not enough intimate relationships.  I have been in a drought relationship-wise for a very long time.  I have never been in a long lasting relationship that has lasted over a year.  Mostly, this is because I have been so desperate to be in one that women run scared away from me.  Partially because my ideas on who I was interested in limited who I was paying attention to.  And who I was paying attention to were not interested in me.  Women who were able to see past the desperation and who I were interested in have been few and far between.

The last one was going to be the last one.  I have learned the secret of keeping a relationship, theoretically.  Applications to test this theory below.  Most people don't learn the secret.  They fall in love and they are with their partner for as long as the love lasts, then they leave, or they enter into senescent love: love that has died over time but neither parties have moved on and they can't think of what to do without each other.  They think they are still In love, but they don't really want to know.  Some few are still in love and are so forever.  Some have even learned the secret of long lasting love. And long lasting sexual interest.  The two are tied.  Without the latter, the former has probably slipped into the former: relationship death.

Are you having sex more than once a week after two years of being together?  Are you having sex more than once a week after five years together?  Maybe that is unrealistic?  Maybe if you think that, you don't know what I know.  Perhaps you only have sex a few times a month and you have been together for years, but the sex is really good.  If you spend less than an hour having sex a month, you probably have a problem.  

Here are my rule: Pay Attention.  People change over time and you need to change with them.  You need to open your eyes and be attentive.  I am not saying that you need to change positions everytime, but you do need to know what the person who you are with likes.  Mostly this is aimed at the guys, because sex is more complicated for women than it is for guys.  

Guys have a penis and it is easy to manipulate and easy to give sensation to, so almost everything works.  Women are different, they have a clitoris, which is external and internal.  It is the size of a penis, but most people don't know that they think it is tiny and hard to find and difficult to use (obviously the wrong word, women know where it is and how to use it).  Men like it simple and if they treat sex as simple, it becomes boring and one sided.  Which will parallel your relationship, it will become boring and one sided.  

I am not saying that great sex means that you are going to have a great relationship, but if you can't have great sex, you are not going to have a relationship for long.  If you are ignoring her physical needs you are probably also ignoring her other needs as well.  Understand?

It is about her needs because as much as people say a relationship is not about sex, it is.  A man starts just having sex with his partner, the typical wham bam, thank-you ma'am, type of sex and then rolls over and goes to sleep, everytime the sex will start to fail.  If the sex is boring for a woman, it will become infrequent.  If sex is something that she looks forward to, she will want to have sex more often.

If you don't know how to give good oral sex men, go google it.  If you are great at giving good oral sex, go google it anyways.  If you think sex lasted a long time and it was less than ten minutes, try to do better.  It is not a race.  Sometimes it is, but that is really about listening your partner.  Try new things like Tantric Sex, the art of making love for a very long time, hours.  

The number one enemy of all relationships is Complacencey; it leads to boredom and it leads to the end.   

Sex is the canary in the coal mine.  I know this because I listen.  I don't have a girlfriend because my desperation scares women away and because I like very small subset of women, but if it happens again I will keep her happy forever.  It might be my lack that is giving me this insight, it might be that I just have empathy.  It might be that I see the value of what many take for granted because they have never experienced a drought.  I might even be speaking out of my ass.  Applications below.

Drought Part I

Living in a drought changes you.  Living in plenty changes you too, but droughts are better changers.  I have a friend whose parents have money and was raised with everything.  The reasons why he was raised with everything are more complex than because his parents had money, but he did and he treated his parents as a safety net.  When he could not find the job that he wanted, he would not settle for a lesser job, he would wait for one that he deserved, in his mind.  Living in Canada, one is wealthy.  But there are people who are more wealthy in my society than others.  As much as I like to think that I lived in poverty in Canada, I know that I do not know what poverty is in the world from first hand experience.  I like to think I do, but I don't.

Poverty, such that it is in Canada, is not something that a lot of people understand.  In Canada, most people don't experience poverty.  In Canada we have a social system which prevents deep poverty and just gives us mild poverty.  Under that system your rent is paid and your food is paid for and nothing else.  You can qualify for this assistance if you have no other money.  You can't own anything either, if you have a house, you have to sell it first and be renting.  I am not sure if you can own a car either, the system might allow that.  My point is you have to not have anything.  If you live in a posh apartment, they tell you that you are living beyond your means.  They interview you in your residence to look at your surroundings.  

What they pay you is enough to cover your rent and enough to buy food.  Not a lot of food and only enough food to survive if you hunt for deals when you shop.    The food allowance is really not that it is more like an everything else allowance.  You want transit tokens? That comes out of the food budget.  You need a phone?  That also comes out of the food budget.  Everything that you need comes out of the food budget.  Luckily, in Canada, we have a charity called the Food Bank.  That is where people redistribute food to people who cannot afford it.  Most poor people look at that organization as a last resort destination.  Being poor is a social stigma, not showing your personal poverty is a point of pride.  Going to the food bank removes that last presence.  I didn't.  I also did not have children.  I also went hungry sometimes.

I was once out with friends, role playing at someone's house.  I had already used one of my precious transit tokens to get there and I had to use one getting back, so this outing was an extravagance.  The guys I were with we're hungry so they ordered from a Chinese restaurant for delivery.  I did not bring any money, I did not have any to bring.  They ate and I said I was not hungry.  They offered me some of their food and I took it.  Chicken Balls.  That was back when I was only in year four of my vegetarianism.  People who know me well know the pains I go to to avoid meat.  

What I am saying is that the poverty, such that it was in wealthy Canada, changed me.  I am not one to turn down an offered job, I am not one to wait for that one job that I wanted when a lesser job is currently available.  I will go for it.  In my near future I will be lacking a job and when one comes around I will go for it part time or full time, two part time jobs or three, I will work if there is a job available.  I will work for peanuts if that is what I have to do.  I have the qualifications to work well above minimum wage, but I will not let that get in my way.  It probably be better if I waited a bit, but I won't, because if you have never been poor, you won't understand.

Seasonal Giving

It is the season for giving, for Christians and well people raised in the Christian world, like me.  I give.  It is not financially wise for me to give, because I am poor, but I do it anyways.  And that is statistically consistent with my socio-economic class; poor people give more of their wealth annually than wealthy people, as measured as a percentage of their net worth.  So far this year I have given a bout $250 dollars divided amongst two charities, United Way and Médecins Sans Frontières.  

There are lots of charities out there and many of them area worthy of your money, but there is a few things that you should know that could change the effectiveness of your donation power.  I am not going to talk about how much money goes to administration verses the people who get help, because that is just the way that it works.  MSF spends your money like this: 4% to administration, 16% to advertising and 80% to its projects.  That is the way it works, without the first two components no one would get anything.  The bus ads the people walking the street soliciting funds being pain minimum wage, the people processing the money, the website where the donation is getting submitted.  These are all important things that need to get done so that Doctors can get into the aftermath of Hurricanes, Earthquakes and other natural disasters and diseases.  I would gladly have all my donation go to the stuff behind the scenes, because it is so important.  

What I do want to talk about is stuff that one of my Podcasts that I listen to has talked about in the past.  Look them up: The Reality Check.  When they talk about donations and charities, listen up!  I will summarize a few things they have said in the past in the next few paragraphs.

Cash is King.  To be very clear, cash has certain advantages over other payment types and that advantage is it is easily used right away.  Cash can be grouped together and deposited once with only one deposit fee.  PayPal and debit have fees associated with each transaction based on the number of donations and credit cards have fees dependent on the overall donation size.  There are benefits to all three.  I donate by credit card because I don't often have the cash on hand at the moment when I donate and credit card donation is very secure.  If I had the money in the bank debit transactions would be better, but they want my donation and they get a lot of donations this way so it is a price of doing business.  

Cash is King II.  At this time of year there are a lot of Food drives for the poor. Food banks are brimming with food for poor people and some places get about half their yearly donations in one short period of time.  This creates a lot of problems: 1) storage of all the food for distribution over the rest of the year.  2) massive hauls mean massive headaches sorting the food, luckily lots of people come and volunteer their time to sort the food so this is alleviated a bit, except those volunteers need to be organized now.  3) variety of foods is low and not necessarily very nutritious.  Beans might be good for lunch and dinner but are they good for breakfast?  If a poor person is of a specific religion they might need different foods.  If they have health concerns ditto.  And all that food does not contain a lot of fresh goods because that stuff has a limited life on the shelf.  Many canned foods are not good forever either, all things expire eventually. 4) it is free, but it is not effective, the above are hidden costs and the inconvenience of food donation is also for the donator as well.  There is a more effective donation form for food drives: Cash.  The benefits of cash are numerous: 1) no shelf life.  Cash does not go bad.  2) there is little in the way of extra costs to donating cash, no extra volunteers, no extra warehouse space needed. 3) it can be used any time through the year to buy food.  It can buy fresh food, perishable food and specialty foods. 4) food banks can buy food at wholesale prices that are often a tenth the price that you pay at the store.  So, that means Cash donations to Food Banks mean more food for less bother than an actual food donation.  $20 worth of food or $20 used to buy $200 worth of food.  They will accept both, but it makes more sense to donate cash than food.

It is a little crude to talk about tax refunds for donations but it is really important to consider.  You can get back about 30% on the first $200 and near 45% on anything over $200 of your donation back from the government if it is a government approved Charity.  My $250 donation means that I can get $85 back and I can donate that if I wish.  All donations add up.  Ten twenty dollar donation equals $200, so get tax receipts and you can donate more, or you get a break on your taxes.  Anything that gets you to donate more money is good.  More is better.

Larger sums are better and larger sums to fewer charities are better too.  The administration of any charge costs to the charity and the cost is fixed so a five dollar donation has the same fee as a five hundred dollar donation.  If you hate a charity a lot you could give them ten thousand one dollar donations and make them pay fifteen thousand dollars to process your ten grand.  You could instead donate your ten grand and limit the charity to one administrative fee.  If you like twenty charities, donate to four every year and rotate through them in five years, better for them.  

It is sad to say that Charities are second class citizens in Canada, the first class societies are Political Parties.  Political donations issue very favourable tax refunds.  75% for the first $399 and 50% to $1000 and 33% to the maximum donation.  However, if you like a certain party it is very worth your while to donate to to political parties.  $400 means a $300 refund.  If charities had those refunds it would be grand.  I am thinking I should donate to a political party, one or two that meet my political goals.  It just makes sense.

Interlude in Big Smoke

Here I sit in an underground cafeteria in Big Smoke looking at all the cute girls, of whom I will never speak to and thus find uninteresting, writing to a "girl" in Russia that I am convinced is actually a computer algorithm designed to scam me some how.  

Writing to someone who has no idea of where you are and what it is like allows you to see things in a new perspective, experiencing it anew again.  Even if the person you are taking to is a computer.

I was supposed to bring my book, it was all queued up and ready to be read, and my writing iPad, it was half charged and still good for a few hours.  

The girls are pretty.  I have discovered that all girls are pretty if you look at them right.  All my friends are pretty, every smile is pretty and so every woman is potentially pretty, because they could all be my friend or they could all smile.  Honey, I did not ask you to smile and not would I ask a woman to, but when everyone smiles they become more attractive.  

I have discovered recently that I am doing relationships wrong, better late then never right?  No.  I liked the people in my life and wish that I had known for them.  Also I have to change who I am looking for and who I find attractive.  It is a good thing that all women are attractive.  I am not twenty-five anymore, so stop thinking that you are twenty-five.  That was the problem, I always knew how old I was, but it did not change how I interacted with the world.  I have to change.   Maybe moving to the burbs of the Big Smoke will allow that to happen.

The problem with Smallville was that I did not fit.  I am not a Hippie because my generation does not have hippies.  But I am strongly attracted to Hippies: strong willed, open minded, alternative lifestyle, liberal minded women.  Every one of the people I have been attracted to, GardenGuru, MPTR, MagicEyes, PolyGirl, SuperGirl and a bunch of girls that I could never approach were that.  But there seems to be a thirty year gap, fifteen year younger or older than me of those type of women—they must exist so they must be married.  They are not in Smallville in any case.  Maybe in Big Smoke I will find one or more of them and they will be looking for me.  

I was thinking the point of a relationship was sex.  Not really, but it is an apt simplification; it works for now.  I wanted the deep conversations and intimacy of a relationship and I could have done without the sex, but my approach was all wrong.  Dating sites may not be the best place to do that, but where else do I have?  Time to give it another spin?

There is a future blog about the Internet women from Russia scam so I will just leave it here.

Time to find a book and a different location to read it.  And look at more women who I won't talk to and who thus do not interest me at all.