How to Be Smart

When I was little, around 3 or 4 or so, I was read to. Quite a bit. Lots of cool picture books and the like. I’m not sure if that’s what did it, but I certainly developed a fondness for reading only matched by my fondness for electronic games. At some point I figured out that the entire world was out there, in books, magazines, newspapers and the like. My first major literary love was the Animorphs series. In second grade, I read as many of those as I could get. I was also quite fond of the Goosebumps series of stories, though they started to wear thin, as every single book included a “surprise” twist ending. After that, in third grade, I was turned on to the harry potter series. I received the 3rd book from the mother of a girl I had been friends with since swim lessons when we were five. I read the third book and absolutely loved it, leading to my rapid consumption of the other two. After that, I can’t say there were any particular trends in the realm of fiction. At some point in 7th or 8th grade, I discovered the brilliant wit and magic of Diana Wynn Jones. I read a great deal of her books in another short span. Ah, I read Enders shadow when I was in 6th grade and absolutely loved it. So I read Enders Game, but not the later novels, at least not until I was fourteen or so. In 8th grade I read all of Dan Brown’s terrible, terrible novels after reading The Da Vinci Code. Also in 8th, I finally read the His Dark Materials trilogy, though having heard about it several times before. It ranks up there as my most re-read novel, with only the Harry Potter series approaching. And that’s only because I would re-read the entire series of Harry Potter just before a new book came out, so I could remember what happened. My heaviest literary period was in my teens, as I went through a vast number of Crichton, King, and Card novels. I also fell in love with the wheel of time series, and finished that over the course of about half a year. Pepper and salt as you please with all sorts of smaller, unrelated books that aren’t particularly memorable. I did read the first few Series of Unfortunate Events but I wasn’t a big fan of those. I have a tendency of only reading books that are particularly critically acclaimed. I read several books in grade school based on that criterion alone. The most recent trilogy of novels I read solely for pleasure was the Soldier’s Son trilogy, by Robin Hobb last year. I thought it was pretty dang good.

That’s just the novels. Magazines I’ve subscribed to over the years (or have been subscribed for me, in the first two examples) were: 3-2-1 Contact, the children’s version of Discover. My favorite part of that magazine was a monthly story featuring some time traveling kids. Cool stuff. Zillions, the consumer reports magazine for kids. Neat reviews of toys and various doodads, with some cool parody comics aimed at corporations. Skip some time, and Electronic Gaming Monthly was the only magazine I read for awhile. Later I read a lot of the regular Discover magazine. Most recently, I read nothing but Newsweek.

Other literary things I’ve read or otherwise done mostly fall under the heading of comics (the strips, mostly). I’ve read the entirety of the following strips: Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, and Peanuts. Read massive portions of Doonesbury as a kid, and re read them getting older (something to be said for the joy of re-discovering exactly what makes the comic funny, or relevant, or biting, or whatever.) I would literally go to the library (up till around sixteen or so) and check out like twelve of their collections of comic strips. And maybe one novel. As I got older, this would translate into manga or graphic novels. The entirety of my comic book based knowledge is formed from these graphic novels. I was never dumb enough to pay two bucks for a booklet full of thirty trite dialogue pages and one page of action. The entirety of my trivial knowledge (which is far vaster than I’d like to admit) is based on the discovery of the magic of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, though it was later built upon through hours and hours of Wikipedia benders.

Though, as my ideological opponents will gladly (and vociferously) tell you, This only leads to book smarts. Valid intelligence, certainly, and a healthy love of books is good for anyone, but it lacks a necessary component to make one truly intelligent: social intelligence. This I may not have in spades, as my life has somewhat interrupted social development. I was a bit violent as a kid, but fairly gregarious. I found that a good deal of kids didn’t like me based on my intelligence or odd habits or whatever else. So I forced kids to like me, either through force or through coercion. Whether or nt this worked is something to leave to philosophers, as frankly I wasn’t all that interested in hanging out with other kids for much of my youth. I typically had one or two really decent friends that I’d actually talk to or hang out with and tons of acquaintances that I don’t really recall. In grade school it didn’t matter much, since you basically just played with whoever or whatever at recess. I was never the last kid called on or the only one shunned, nor was I the first. My life took a turn for the strange around sixth grade, shortly after my parents divorced. I had already been sent off to my aunt about a year previously as a solution to my “out of control behavior” wherein I’d refuse to do homework or much of anything besides play video games. Since my mother suddenly (well, the divorce was her idea, so, premeditatedly?) found herself a single mom, it put a bit of strain on her to have a relatively non functioning kid. Anyway, I returned and started sixth grade where things were a bit different. Previously, I went to the elementary school which was literally up the street from my house. For Middle school, I was expected to get up much earlier to catch a bus . Naturally, I didn’t take to well to this change, causing my mother to become rather more upset by my behavior. Middle school didn’t treat me well. I didn’t get along with anyone at the school, and I had been properly brow beaten out of fighting as a method to cope (or whatever it was) . it was then I become the losery kid who slept through morning math and was failing every class except English (I had an exceptionally stern teacher, Mrs. Beadle, who managed to frighten me into doing my work). Details here are a bit fuzzy, but at some point in this period of time I did something that seemed especially heinous to my mother, and she submitted me to a psychologist to figure out what was presumably wrong with me. The test came back more or less negative, and my mom was very annoyed at this. We left the psychologists office, and returned to the parking lot to make a phone call to her boyfriend (and later husband) Jim. At some point during this, she remarked to me “You’re not coming home with me,” which drove me into a fit of depression, fiercely enough that I hit myself several times on the head on a pillar thing that was nearby several times, until my forehead became bloody and scratched.

My mother, upon seeing this, took me back upstairs to the office and to emphasize her point, she thrust me forward in the office and shouted something along the lines of “there is something wrong with this child!” at the presumably bewildered patients and doctors. Later that day, she admitted me for the first time to (Vernon?, Divinity?, Dominion? I can’t recall. It was next to a freeway and right at the beginning of Virginia, I think) Mental Hospital. It was an interesting place, and incidentally where I read Enders Shadow. I was more or less myself, as I got over the ordeal rather quickly. During the group meetings, when we introduced ourselves, I would jokingly point at my somewhat scabbed forehead and say “I’m here because of this.” My best friend in that place was a pyromaniac. I remember once sneaking really late at night (I was a chronic insomniac back then) into another kids room to try that “put a hand in a cup of water at night to make them pee” thing. I can’t recall if it worked. Anyway, not to dwell on that too much, I was released with a diagnosis of minor depression. Details are again fuzzy here, but that certainly wasn’t the end of it. I was admitted one more time to Dominion (I’m pretty sure this is it) later, and released again with the same diagnosis (I later learned that it’s the most minimal diagnosis that can be justified having my stay there). At some point after that I was placed in a group home. The group home had been intended for teenagers, but they put me in because I was 12 and the justification was that I was close enough. The group home was another interesting experience. Naturally, I didn’t along well with the teenagers, who thought (probably rightly) that I was a pest and would gladly torment me, just for kicks. Anyway, they had a computer at the group home, though no video game consoles. I was very adamant about acquiring an internet connection for said computer (so I could play more games, natch) to the point that when I found a key ring in an old desk, I tried them all out until I found the key to the little psychologists office there and I unplugged the phone cord so as to use for an internet connection. I was never particularly good at concealing my misdeeds (I once stole a Troll branded package of gummies from a super market when I was 4. Instead of properly eating my stolen item, I went and showed it off to my mom like a week later) and I was quickly caught when the line of questioning turned towards “where did you get that?”

Of course I got in huge trouble, my mom was called, and so on. This lead my mom to taking me out of the home. Before I left, one of the counselor guys insisted on playing chess with me. He went on about how I divided and conquered people, and that was how I worked (I doubt it had anything to do with the chess game, I was terrible at chess). So this lead my mom to once again drive to a different hospital and demand (at some 10 at night) that they evaluate me. By the time someone came out, it was around two, and he said that there was nothing wrong with me. When we got home that night, my mom made me sleep on the kitchen floor and insisted on staying until I was asleep, to make sure I wouldn’t touch the gas burners (something that I had never done). Shortly afterward, I was shipped off to go live with my grandmother. There is a bit more stuff in this period, such as a house fire that led to me and mom living with Jim for awhile, and me having to take the metro and walk to school each morning (it wasn’t that bad, like four blocks away).

Well, I went to live with grandma, another interesting experience. If you may have noticed, I really don’t mention a lot of people outside myself here. I didn’t have really very many friends in this period. There was Ben and his brother Matt in the after school care, as well as my mortal nemesis, Tony, (the kid was a total dick. He once stole an awesome K’nex motorcycle thing I had made and claimed he built it. Later, while we were playing football [tackle, touch is for pussys] he ran into the brick wall we were using as a goal and had to be carted off by some medical people.) but outside of that there were few people in my life beyond me and mom. At grandmas, I didn’t do much. I didn’t go to school for the rest of sixth grade, and only had a tutor in the summer to keep me grade level or whatever was the excuse. I spent a lot of time on my grandma’s computer, playing around on the internet, downloading games, filling the thing with viruses. I played a lot of video games. I would rent an N64 game almost weekly and more or less played through every game that EGM deemed worthy that was on the n64. I discovered the magic of card games, after having dabbled in Pokemon cards in grade school. I rode the initial yu-gi-oh wave, but stuck with magic: the gathering, since the cards were cheaper. I went to a special school in seventh grade. It was pretty weird. The teacher was some sort of self healed manic depressive (or something) who often went on about how she hoped the kids would learn to get past the problems before they turned forty like she did. You were allowed, and encouraged to take your shoes off in class and stuff like that. There was also a twice a week class in Su bok to, a south Korean martial art taught by another one of the teachers at that school. I made one friend, who I think was named Eric. Very similar to me. That all more or less ended when my mom came back up to Montana to more or less reclaim me. I didn’t want to go, I was perfectly happy with my life of decadence, but she insisted to the point of calling up CPS to remove me from my grandmother’s home. That was the end of my twelth year.

So, I came back to Maryland. My mom, on the first day, impressed on me that she was very serious about things, going so far as to tie my hands together to demonstrate what would happen to me if I dared lift a finger against her (something I had never done). Properly intimidated, I went about life as best I could. I was enrolled in the local middle school (mom had moved out with and married Jim while I was in Montana), where my previous woes more or less continued. Other kids thought I was weird because I’d take off my shoes in class and wouldn’t do much work. I was also kinda chubby at this point. Too much general lethargy in Montana. So, after I got into a scuffle during P.E. (it was wrestling, and some kid had punched me after I was down. No lie, he punched me in my open mouth. The ol’ Ow! he bit me, bit. More scuffling after) I was sent of to a special school for the emotionally disturbed. I want to say it was called “Discovery” or some such. There, I was treated to some of the easiest classes I’d ever attended, where participation counted more towards a grade than actual correct answers. Also had a weekly therapy session, where I did very little beyond play fetch with a dog and answer the occasional question. At home things weren’t all that great. A few weeks after I arrived, my mom quit her job (Because, you know, she now had a rich engineer hubby to take care of her), and devoted her life to watching me, not cleaning (seriously) and spending her time on craigslist or freecycle picking up various doodads to fill our garage with. On the Jake front, I was quickly banned from eating in the living room, one of the least enforced rules I’ve seen in my life, because I had spilled some soup on the carpet. Things are going a bit out of chronological order here, as they all happened in another place and time and mindset, so bear with me if I stop making sense. At this point in time I was denied my main source of fun, namely videogames, all my consoles and stuff were still in Montana. All I had, for some reason, was a computer in my room with internet access. This was enough for me, more or less, except that access was extremely curtailed, and was on a permission basis only. I would have to nag my mom or Jim to let me on, and there were other various strange stipulations. Jim is a somewhat temperamental man, and he would sometimes refuse me access if I was too pushy. I believe I had computer privileges taken away for some amount of time for turning on the computer prematurely.

Well, I’m not sure why I wrote this. It feels good and right and all to get it out, but I’m not sure If I’m just expressing myself, or digging for sympathy. Like a lot of things, it’s probably a little of both. I don’t really tell this to many people I know, with maybe three people having some of the general idea of it. It’s true, what they say, each time you tell it, the easier it gets. Anyway, if you feel (probably rightly) that I’m just inviting you to a pity party, I hope you can forgive my vanity of holding one.

Obviously, there's more to the story, but neither my mind nor my heart is into writing the rest of it. I still feel terrible posting this, so ingrained is my self hatred for "attention seeking" or whatever. I dunno. It's complicated. Actually, I'm on the verge of deleting it again.

Gregarious Gadgetry

Today I considered placing a "gadget," one of tens of thousands (apparently) onto my blog. It was going to be "plane lander" so that I may practice my aeronautical alightment skills while pondering the tumultuous situation in the middle east. I felt dirty afterward and washed my hands a few times. Then my ego commanded me to make this post. I feel dirty again....

Today

I turn Nineteen. Yaaaaay!

Ah, The Boundless Power of Creativity

I do quite enjoy Kingdom Hearts.

Those of you who are still reading, thank you. My appreciation for the series has little to do with Disney or Final Fantasy, neither of which I particularly care for, but with the game itself as a whole: an engaging third person action game. I rather like this genre of games and find Kingdom Hearts to be one of the best, if for no other reason than sheer production values. There is a wide range of special moves (summons, limits, drives) to unleash and a great deal of options as far as playing style. But the most important part, and probably the reason I place Kingdom Hearts so highly, is the fantastic Gummi Ship mode.

In my erstwhile life, I did posses a great number of Lego brand building blocks. The most common thing I built with these blocks was spaceships. Lots and lots of spaceships. Almost exclusively, spaceships. My imagination ran the gamut from a range of simple three piece models for vast space wars, to a hulking behemoth armed with six rotating cannons, three missile platforms, and an emergency escape pod I rather liked. The Gummi Ship mode of Kingdom Hearts brings me back to these halcyon days, while animating my imagination that wasn't possible in plastic toy form. Only in this game is the level of customization at a point where I can recreate nearly every ship I can come up with in my imagination and actually play with them in an actual space shooting session.

But I could be wrong. Are there any other games that allow the same amount of creativity as this? I have no stipulations, I'm willing to try anything.

Edit: Hoping for this sort of thing, I bought THQ's "Drawn to Life" hoping for a similar experience. What I got was a mediocre platformer with a generic story and aggravating between world bits. It reminded me more of a flash game than a DS game.

The Explicit Joys of Poll Working

I wrote this last thursday, didn't finish until today.


Well, I spent Tuesday working the polls. It was a fun and interesting experience. decent turnout, had about half the people in the district vote directly, I'm sure more voted early or by mail. I didn't take notes, So I'll go by what I recall. In the morning we had a short line of people waiting to vote as soon as the polls opened. It went a bit shaky at first because most of the people working hadn't done this before (including two cute girls, one of which I got the number of), but we smoothed it out as we went ahead. As is expected, there was an eclectic bunch of voters. All sorts of people. Mostly older professionals, as the precinct I was working at is in the middle of a large high end apartment complex.

A few interesting things happened. Around 4 o'clock or so, a polite guy a bit older than me from the Buchanan campaign came by to "flush votes" wherein they look at the publicly posted rolls to see who hasn't voted yet and go hassle them to vote. He actually went outside and took his outer shirt off when he realized he still had a "Buchanan" shirt on. It wasn't that big a deal, as no one was there, and we were being somewhat lax anyways. (several people came in with Obama shirts on and sort of rushed through the process before they could be admonished, in a hurry to vote for the only candidate they cared about, apparently) He came back later with a voter who was clearly mentally challenged and had him vote. He didn't stand over him or anything (In fact, he actually stood way in the back and was covering the Buchanan embossment on his shirt with a folder he was carrying. He looked rather silly) and one of us pollsters helped him vote (the first ballot, he had just checked next to the names of the candidate)

Fortunately, no one wanted to vote electronically, as us poor poll workers had no idea how that would work out. A thing in the instructions said that if one person were to use it, four more people would also have to use it, for whatever reason. It's very complicated, involving a second machine we would use to activate little cards and password lock them and give them to the people, when they would take it over and insert it to display the ballot. from there they would vote and the card would be deactivated.

It seems a lot more inconvenient than just the paper ballots, which work similarly to "Scantron" technology that instructors have been using for years to grade tests, albeit with ink instead of pencil. After a person fills all the lines to choose the candidate they wanted, they would insert it into a big, vaguely evil looking machine that would take the ballot, scan it, and deposit into a bin inside. The machine at the end of the day prints out a tally of the votes it received and we post a copy that just outside the door. We then take the ballots, put them in a secure box thing and deliver them to the registrar to be (presumably) hand counted later. Much less complex than the machine voting thing. I think.

Yay!

I learned my first song besides Mary Had a Little Lamb which I knew from piano lessons years ago. I feel so proud of myself. Positively giddy.

It turns out my blog has a readability level of:


Which happens to be exactly where I'm at. How anticlimactic. I am average. Yeah, neither of the essays I've published scored A's. Both were in the B range. I have a complete inability to follow stipulations when it comes to essay writing, something that holds me back academically, but I feel is perfectly justified from a writing standpoint.

I think I may have mentioned this before, but I'll say it again: my interests variate almost daily. I will find myself hooked on a particular philosophical quandary or physical activity for a week or so and move on to another by the weeks end. They do return eventually, after it has been long enough for the idea or activity to seem new to me once more. For example, right now I'm off both reading and writing. Neither of them interest me in the least. I'm interested in music, right now. most specifically learning to play it legitimately, but I also just downloaded a bunch of Korean rock (which turns out to be awesome). About a week ago, this day, I was intensely interested in trying to write poetry. A week before that it was rereading Stephen King's Insomnia (my favorite novel of his, I found it for a quarter). And so on.

I really am sort of odd.

I confess

I don't actually know how to play the piano. I know the basic theory behind rhythm and a few chords, but when I play, I play solely tunes that I make up spontaneously. I often miss notes or hit the wrong ones. I think I'll rectify this horrid mistake. By the end of this year, I will learn how to read sheet music. I may buy another Bass while I'm at it. My upstairs neighbors play loud electronica music well into the nine o'clock hour, so I'll find a way to drown them out.

I actually worry about this somewhat. My upstairs neighbors (let's call them MUNs for short) have a two year old and a 6ish (I forgot) month old baby. They're both pretty young and throw parties once a week or so. I worry about the kids, since really, these people are not anywhere near mature enough to have kids. I hung out at one of their parties, and witnessed this little dude run around, hit people, throw tantrums for all sorts of things, attempt to throw a pet kitten (madness!) off the balcony twice, and generally be a nuisance. I did catch him and got him to read a book with me, which he seemed to enjoy. The baby was in a little bumper thing right next to a speaker, which is what worries me most, since I myself have bilateral hearing loss possibly caused by the same sort of thing (when kids are young and not diagnosed early enough, it becomes a tossup as to the cause. In my case it could have been damage through auditory extremes, [my mom is into hardcore rock] birth defect, bacterial damage [had tons of ear infections as a toddler], or some other unexplained cause). But of course, it's their kids and their life; and if they're happy with it, who am I to disrupt?

I've been listening to That handsome devil quite a bit lately, I bought their first album for 2 bucks at an Amoeba Music in SF. Turns out they're a great band. I will do my civic duty and spread the word (and the link) here. If their only link is a myspace page, does that make them underground? To be fair, they've had it since 2005, when the whole trend of band myspaces was only barely started. Personally I hate the idea. It seems like a dumb method to "get in with the youth" by evil soulless corporations.

There, I wrote a whole long post without a bit of interesting original material by me. Now to start a cult of personality. Love me, Internet! Love me!

By the By

I'm not dead or anything, just very busy. I'll tell you all about it later.

Today, The Last Day Of Someone’s Life

Fascinating. I suppose it's a given, but I've found that my traffic spikes (from 1 or 2 to 7 or 10, whee!) about a day after I post a new entry. The question I have is: how is that? How do you guys know I've posted a new post? RSS feeds are my best guess, I suppose.

I feel somewhat depressed. I wrote about 600 words of a 1000 word short story I intended to post yesterday, but I accidentally deleted it. It has completely crushed my interest in writing a new short story, at least for the moment. Sigh.

Anyway, I came up with a screenplay idea. I have yet to hammer out the details, but it involves a man who throws chainsaws as weapons. Given Hollywood's current state, it should sell millions.

I copyright that concept.

Pogs are cool

So I had a nice holiday weekend. I spent it with family in Alameda, an interesting offshoot of Oakland. (it’s on an island right next to Oakland) It has a strange vibe. It’s most definitely a rich town comparatively, but the streets are still full of cracks and crevices, the buildings run down and the demographic generally Oaklandish. All of the new buildings though, have a sort of yuppy feel, with a super big national grocery chain store right next to a good sized national food outlet store chain next to it. There’s a brand new books/music/movies/coffee shop store there two, that even has a fancy escalator in the middle.

There were quite a lot of teenagers there, though. Teenagers make me worried, since they’re basically adults with less inhibition. Apparently, some years ago, when Alameda first became a destination, quite a number of families moved out there. The kids grew up and are now average graffito spraying, overly privileged suburban kids. Humph.

A more interesting post on the morn, dear gents.

Phases, Places

So, I haven’t shown up in a bit. Probably a bad habit, I should update this daily, if for no one other than my 26 steady readers. Yesterday I decided to pick up some form of music editing software, so I google “garage band for windows” and I found Mixcraft 4 by Acoustica® and put together a few songs. I put the only one that I feel is ready for the public on last.fm, so you can listen to (or download) it here.

Flew off my bike for the first time in three years today. Got a nasty bump on my left shin, but otherwise I escaped unharmed. Was trying to open a bottle of sports drink while riding. It was working fine until I decided to brake.