All Hallow's Eve

Daily status: the DJI has dropped 1,615 points since the bailout passed on October 3rd. Your Federal tax dollars at work!

OK, so there are many things people think of on Halloween. Graveyards, candy, the Great Pumpkin, vampires, costume parties... the list is long.

I tend to think of two very different themes on October 31st; I'll call them "candy & costumes" and "spirits & souls."

"Candy & costumes" is pretty obvious, though the costumes I wear tend to be rather more authentic than most people's. In many cases they are old uniforms that I, or family members, used to wear for real; one year I wore my father's Army Dress Uniform during the day, then switched to fatigues for the athletic period. I think of this as the happy parts of halloween.

"Spirits & souls", though it may surprise you, has nothing to do with horror movies or scary stories. One of my favorite episodes of Babylon 5 is "Day of the Dead", and I think of Heather Alexander's "Samhain" a lot as well. Yes, we're a lot closer to the dead, but the dead aren't something to fear. Absent companions are closer (for most of us, at least), then dead enemies.

Two things I have no interest in are pranks and horror. Pranks because most of them show no originality and are simply destructive, horror because I've seen quite enough of that in real life and have no desire to seek it out in fiction.

And, for the record, I believe in The Great Pumpkin rather more than I believe in most religious figures.

Perspective

Edit: Daily status: the DJI has dropped 1,805 points since the bailout passed on October 3rd. Your Federal tax dollars at work!

Regarding last night's post:

Yes, I know that compared to most of the world's population I'm very well off. I have a steady job, a roof over my head, enough to eat, and no bandits knocking on my door asking for protection or looking for loot. For that matter, if they do, I have the means to stop them and a law enforcement system that will most likely protect me when I do.

I'm also familiar with Lazlo's Chinese Relativity Axiom. "No matter how great your victories or how painful your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less."

Well, this blog isn't about one billion Chinese, its about me, and the handful of people who read it.

Summary

Today:

Criticism
Disrespect
Lies
Failure
Bad timing
Bad news
Rejection
Abandonment
Frustration
Ineptitude
Denial

Leading to:

Apathy
Anger
Alcohol abuse
Loneliness

And, purely as a side note, bad spelling. Luckily for that there is spell check.

Half a dozen phone calls, at least one of which I shouldn't have made.

Three episodes of Grey's Anatomy, none of which I watched all the way through.

Oh, and I managed to get pizza sauce on a white shirt. My cat tried to bite me. I voted, and I can barely remember who I voted for. Its OK, almost all of them are going to loose.

However, I have established that Moroccan wine is better at room temperature.

For every cloud, there is a silver lining. In some cases it is monomolecular, but it is there.

Laughs

Daily status: the DJI has dropped 1,729 points since the bailout passed on October 3rd. Your Federal tax dollars at work!

I really hope I can stop giving the daily status soon, but even if the DJI keeps going up like it did today it'll be the end of the week, and somehow I don't think the rate of rise today is sustainable.

I need some more laughs to start out my day, especially when I have early morning meetings at work like the one I did today, so I'm asking you: what web comics do you read in the morning?

I currently read Sluggy Freelance, Dilbert, Real Life Comics, User Friendly, Order of the Stick, and (on Sundays) Foxtrot.

Please note that while I don't insist on a punch line every day, or object to a dramatic plot arc now and again, I am mostly looking for laughs here.

Disassociated

Daily status: the DJI has dropped 2,620 points since the bailout passed on October 3rd. Your Federal tax dollars at work!

I feel... isolated. Which is odd, since I just had three people over for a board game party yesterday and I've been re-connecting with people via Facebook.

Or is it because I've been reconnecting with people? So many have gotten married, had children, changed jobs, even just graduated from college! Effectively none of the people I spent those critical years with are still the people I knew then.

I've been thinking a lot lately of the modern mobile society. We grow up, then we move to go to college, and in many cases we move on from there to someplace else. We think nothing of driving half an hour and a dozen miles to work, and we don't get to know our neighbors. We chat online with friends we haven't seen face to face in years. We all slowly grow our own circles of friends, which never quite overlap with our old ones. Someone moves and doesn't pass on a phone number or an email address, and it is as if they've vanished from the face of the earth. No one knows where they are, or what happened to them.

I can't help thinking about how we connect with the communities we're in during the digital age. A LOT of the communities I'm part of are electronic; I seldom if ever see the people I talk to there in real life. So, in a real crisis, who do I turn to? The electronic communities won't be there. My friends in other states won't be there. Even my "local" friends are mostly hours away by foot, and in traffic jams probably not much closer by car.

So if it all comes apart, who do I turn to? Who will you turn to?