So I haven’t added anything to this site in a really long time. Sorry about that. Things with the Girlfriend’s mother took a turn for the worse shortly after my last post, and I’ve spent the last several months helping her through that. The blog and my writing were both basically shelved during that time. Events sort of knocked me off the horse, and now I’m trying to get back in the saddle.

So, naturally, I’m just going to write on and pretend like that little blip never happened. I haven’t felt the urge to blog about anything for a long while, but recently, I was linked to this article and this image. I found both to be pretty thought-provoking.

Not because I agree with the message of the video, mind you – I really like how progressive the Girl Scouts are as an organization, and viewing these things makes me want to buy Samoas by the crateload.

Rather, I look at the young scout doing the talking and feel a bit sorry for her. I don’t know whether these are her own ideas, or whether she was put up to it by Concerned Conservative Parents, or if that even matters. I do know that she’s only fourteen, and the next ten years will probably be somewhat transformational. They were for me – you challenge your old assumptions, are exposed to new ideas, and grow up a lot in that time. Maybe she’ll go on to change her mind about these issues as she learns more about them, or maybe she’ll chair her school’s Christian Union and Young Republicans Club in college. I don’t know. But whatever she does, this video will still be kicking around in some forgotten corner of the internet when she does it.

It makes me really thankful that I grew up in a time when the stupid shit I said and did as a teenager wasn’t recorded for posterity. I had some idiotic opinions when I was her age – pretty much everybody does when they’re fourteen, I’m sure. I have the luxury of being able to stow those memories in a corner of my mind, away from my friends and the general public. What shame I feel for that time of my life is fleeting, quiet, and private. This girl… I think she’s on the wrong side of history, and she may come to realize that in the next decade. But she won’t have the same privilege of leaving her teenaged opinions behind, since the evidence is more or less there to stay.

There isn’t a message or moral to that comment. It just leaves me a little sad, and (somewhat selfishly) grateful that I managed to get through age 12 – 20 without recording myself doing something particularly dumb.

Another, more personal reason I find it thought-provoking is the Scouts in general. The Girl Scouts are a lot more forward-thinking and aligned with my own moral compass than the Boy Scouts of America. By age 18, though, I’d earned my Eagle Scout rank. I was, and am, proud of that – it took a lot of hard work and community service, and I’d been working at it for at least half a decade. Succeeding at something you try that hard to achieve is always sweet. The Boy Scouts helped me make friends, helped me get into college, and gave me a number of positive experiences to take into adulthood.

Yet I can’t help but be aware that if I believed then what I believe now, I wouldn’t have qualified. Atheists can’t be Eagle Scouts – I am both, but only because I lost belief in god after I earned that rank. Indeed, if I were transported back to that age, I’m fairly certain that I wouldn’t want to be an Eagle Scout. To me as a teenaged kid, Scouts was all about camping, hiking, setting fun things on fire, and learning. To me as an adult, Scouts also seems to be about religion and homophobia – things that I certainly don’t want to stand for.

The cognitive dissonance I get from trying to reconcile my experience with the Scouts as a positive force in my own life with my belief that the BSA is becoming increasingly backwards on the national scene is… uncomfortable. By contrast, the Girl Scouts are a breath of fresh air.

I write this post a little bit numb. My girlfriend and I are facing some pretty hard times.

Becki is incredibly close to her family. We make a point to head down to Wales once every three weeks or so, because she feels that she needs to make contact with the clan… especially her mother. Her relationship to her mother is very important to her.

So, two weeks ago, when her mother was in the hospital with suspected gallstones, Becki was understandably worried. I told her that gallstones aren’t life threatening, that there are ways to break the stones up or remove them with surgery, so her mother would be back to normal in no time at all. All they needed to do was run a few tests and confirm the diagnosis before they put her through some routine, painless treatment.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t gallstones. It was pancreatic cancer.

I won’t go into details about the diagnosis, save to underline the fact that it is a very serious one. Pancreatic cancer is rare, and it is especially dangerous because it displays no symptoms until it’s at an advanced stage, which is what happened here. It was all incredibly sudden. A month ago, she was her usual self. All of a sudden, she has cancer at an advanced stage. It’s terrifying.

This is all sort of unprecedented for me. I’m fond of her – not just because she’s a good person, but also because she’s so important to my one-and-only. I see a lot of her in Becki, and I’m frightened for her. I’m frightened for her whole family. I don’t know what to do or how to respond, and I feel certain that this tragedy will come to define the next several months, even if everything goes as well as can be expected.

It’s inspiring to see everyone pull together to get behind her for this. The phone over there has been ringing off the hook with well-wishers, and we have enough Welsh Cakes to feed an American family for like forty minutes. People are over constantly to see how she’s doing and keep her company. Becki, her brothers, and all of their partners – numbering six in total, including myself – have all teamed up to take care of the cooking, the washing up, and other various household chores. Everyone’s come together to help keep things normal and fight this thing.

It’s hard to watch. It’s difficult to see Becki go through it, and it’s almost too strange to accept as real. I’ve never experienced anything like this myself and can’t even imagine what it’s like for her. It’s not the sort of thing that you can make better with enough comforting words and cuddles. I feel pretty much rudderless and have no idea what to do. There isn’t really anything I can do but hold her and not let go.

It’s only going to get worse – even if all goes well, and they can shrink the tumor with chemo, it’s going to be an immense challenge for all of us over the next several months.

I mentioned earlier that it’s hard to accept as real. It’s like that for all of us, not just me – most days, Becki and I just go about our usual business. I practice drawing, write, go to work. She exercises and tries to manage her own insane workload. We laugh, tell jokes, and do all of the things that we ordinarily do. Then, often in the evenings, she’ll remember. She’ll cry and I’ll hold her, and it’s awful.

It’s also difficult to accept that there’s little we can do. We can do some cooking and cleaning for the family and keep her mother company. We can try to keep her spirits high. We can be there for support. But the hard battle is something she’ll have to go through on her own.

I’m in Gloucester, now, working as usual. So is Becki. I can’t help but feel like we should be down there, and I know Becki feels the same. Yet we can’t just abandon our lives, and the time off we have to spare is limited. Our employers are understanding, but it wouldn’t be fair of us to take a solid month off and still expect money. Besides, there’s little we can do right now. We’re still spending as much time as possible in Wales with her family, yet I often wonder if it’s enough. I feel real pangs of guilt over this. I almost feel like we should just drop everything and be there for the next several weeks, even though the reality is that it won’t solve anything. I feel like if we don’t, we’ll regret it.

I feel a lot of things. Above all, though, I feel fear. It is a general sense of foreboding that waxes and wanes, but never vanishes.

The worst part is that Becki’s mother is fairly young at just over 50. She had no risk factors – she doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, no drugs, nothing like that. This came out of nowhere.

Ask your parents to get themselves checked out. I did. I’d hate for this to happen to anyone else.

Why do we hate fat people so much?

I see this discussion come up from time to time in the dark corners of the internet I frequent. It’s seen as somewhat acceptable to ridicule the obese in a way that society wouldn’t permit for other minorities. You can’t control who your ancestors were, what your sexual orientation is, or what gender you were born with, but you do have power over what food you put into your bodies and how much of it you eat. Therefore, obesity is a choice, and ridicule is more acceptable to society if your ‘condition’ is something you have control over. The other side of the debate takes exception to this, claiming that fat haters are lacking in empathy and have no idea what it’s like to live with a ‘food addiction,’ and occasionally even go so far as to state that obesity is a disability that warrants special treatment by society and subsidized care from the taxpayers.

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I was having a discussion with my girlfriend the other day as we drove back to our place. The topic: “How do I change peoples’ attitudes and behaviors with regard to waste?” It’s a subject dear to her heart. She is, after all, a Sustainability Consultant by trade.

Let’s face it. Our society is inherently wasteful. We live in a culture where pulling oil from the ground, making plastic from it, shipping the raw materials to a factory, manufacturing a new plastic spoon, and sending it to the consumer to be used once before being thrown away is seen as less effort than washing your spoon and using it again. My girl has always been sort of disgusted by this attitude, and trying to change it in the companies she’s employed with is her job. So the story of the single-use spoon is one that keeps her up at night. From time to time, we’ll talk about it and solve the world’s problems in conversation. It’s fun. Anyone who has ever had a circlejerk political discussion with likeminded friends knows what I’m talking about.

Anyway, while we were talking, I had a bit of an epiphany. Sustainability Greens are the Linux nerds of environmental science.

Bear with me, here.

Linux has a lot going for it. It’s useful, it’s free and open source, it’s quite customizable, and it’s quite efficient when it comes to utilizing the system resources. In short, for those in the know, it’s pretty much better than Windows at most things, and it costs absolutely nothing to use. Yet it has a tiny shred of the market share by comparison. Why don’t more people use Linux, then? A couple months ago, I witnessed a discussion on this very topic unfold. One user made a damned good point that agrees with my experiences as a new user of Linux. It went something like this – please forgive my paraphrasing:

“Linux isn’t as popular as Windows because it’s a lot harder to use. I think you guys are overestimating the level of tech proficiency in the general population of computer users. Have you used the latest version of Windows? It caters to that market. The average user never has to open the command line in Windows. That’s why it’s more popular.”

Obviously, this heretic was burned at the stake before he could back up his points. Fans of the OS attacked his argument on all fronts, but the general consensus of the opposition was something like “It’s not hard to use. You’re just stupid.”

I disagree. Once you open the command line, you’ve crossed the border into territory that’s far too frightening and complex for the average user to keep at it. Sure, they probably could learn what to do if they really tried. But they won’t – they’ll reboot their computers into Windows. The end result is that you get to feel smug and self-superior, but Linux keeps its small market share. This kind of thing is fine for Linux, which continues to thrive even though the vast majority of computer users don’t even know what it is, but this just isn’t acceptable for something as vital as Sustainability.

The “It’s not hard to do. You’re just stupid.” mentality definitely does exist in Sustainability and Environmentalism. In our car-ride conversation, I brought up the example of recycling to highlight the importance of simplicity at the user end.

Recycling is a simple concept. The products you use are made of resources that still have value even after the product itself ceases to be useful, and recycling is the process by which these resources are recovered. The alternative to recycling is the landfill. The idea of the landfill is also a simple one – you take everything in the bin and you put it in a pile on some undesirable scrap of land. You continue to do this until you run out of space, at which point you need to find another landfill. Which of these options is the environmentally friendly one? The answer should be obvious like the bleached-blonde hair on a girl’s upper lip.

Yet not everyone recycles. Recycling isn’t compulsory, and a lot of recyclable materials end up heaped in the landfill. Why? Why would people deliberately choose to waste things? How do we get them to change?

The answers to this are varied, and the focus tends to be on changing peoples’ attitudes, making them care, and ‘making Green sexy.’ Sustainability Greens will have their work cut out for them if this is the path they pick. It is not easy to get people off of the path of least resistance by rhetorical argument alone. You have to create a compelling message, get people to listen to it and agree with it, and hope that it’s enough to change peoples’ actions. It is extremely difficult to do this intentionally and reliably.

Behavior Change is hard. It’s pretty damned difficult to achieve on your own, when you have a real desire for it. Have you ever tried to lose weight, quit smoking, or stop biting your nails? It’s tough. Succeeding on a grand scale with a passive audience is far more challenging than that.

I think that the interested parties are approaching the problem in the wrong way. The immediate solution is not to make people care more, it’s to improve and simplify the end user’s participation in the desired behavior.

Back to Recycling.

When someone has an item that they want to be rid of, they have two solutions to choose between. One of these is easy, and one of these is hard.

The easy solution is to throw it in the bin, which takes all of two seconds – perhaps as many as ten if you try to toss it in basketball style and miss the shot. You might feel a little bit of guilt at sentencing that plastic bottle to death by slow decomposition in a landfill, but this will be short-lived.

Recycling is the hard solution. It requires more labor and specialist knowledge of the rules. You need to know what bin it belongs in, of course, but it’s more complicated than that. Is the item you’re trying to dispose of cardboard? Yeah, we can take that. Unless it’s been exposed to food, in which case, we can’t. Wait, is it corrugated? Go ahead, look it up. I’ll wait. Is it? Yes? Tough break, to the landfill it goes. Got any plastic? Is it the right plastic number? Because we can only take certain numbers, you know, and we also expect you to sort by color. Whoa, are you trying to recycle yogurt pots? Shit, man, what are you trying to do, kill us all? You can’t recycle those! What do you mean, ‘How is that any different to my plastic soup containers?’ It just is! Oh, cider bottles are glass. We can take those, if they’re the right color. But wait… the top is still on it, and that’s metal. Do you need to take that off and put that in the right bin? Wait, what if it touched food? What if I get this wrong? Will that sentence the whole bin to the landfill? Okay, cool, now we’re all sorted on the rules. We can now recycle all the time. Except, wait, you’re moving to a new town? Sorry, you need to learn all the rules and guidelines again. It’s mostly the same, except… you know what? Fuck it, just throw it out.

Ahem.

My point is that people don’t see ‘waste’ and ‘recycle’ when they’re trying to dispose of things. They see an easy option and a hard option. They pick the easy option. Why can’t everything go into a single bin, to be sorted at the plant? Why can’t we recycle some things that have touched food, but not others? Why can’t we have standardized rules for it across the country? If you want more people to recycle, you need to make recycling easy.

The response to this? “It’s not hard. You’re just stupid.”

While that’s true, it doesn’t solve the problem.

If I am honest with myself, I’ll admit that in the back of my mind, I have always sort of bought into the ‘girls don’t play video games’ meme. Even though I’ve run into several exceptions to this rule throughout my life, I always sort of assume that the girls I know don’t really share my enjoyment of games.

The Girlfriend plays games sometimes. Co-op shooters always win big in our house… I had a ton of fun playing Gears of War co-op with her. That game is average quality playing solo, but she and I had endless fun teaming up in order to blast the Locust and roleplay the obvious homoerotic tension between the main characters. To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever laughed quite so hard playing a video game. We also played other, similar two-player games like Halo: Reach, and I like to include her whenever I can with these co-op games. It’s infinitely more fun to play them with a partner.

But I have had no luck trying to convince her to pick up some of my favorite single-player games. She tends to lose interest in them pretty quickly – even games that I am certain she will enjoy, like Mass Effect and Dragon Age.

So I was sort of surprised when she asked me if I owned the game Fallout 3, and if I would let her play it. I don’t know what caused her sudden interest. I did own the game, and I’ve put like 60+ hours into it, but I hadn’t played F3 in years. Maybe she saw me playing New Vegas, or maybe she watched her brother playing it at some point.

When she first put the disc in, however, I made up my mind to do my absolute best to just let her get on with it. I’d watch, I’d answer questions, and I’d help her out if she deliberately asked me to, but I would do everything I could not to interfere with her experience.

Everything went better than expected. I usually don’t enjoy watching someone else play games, but this has been one hilarious ride.

Right away, she makes a female character named Phil and proceeds to cut a bloody swath of destruction through Vault 101 as she shoots, punches, and baseball-bats her way to victory. No compromise or speech checks for her – oh, no. She kills the overseer on her way out, enacts gory retribution on half the security staff, and sets off across the wasteland. Before long, all would hear the name of Phil and tremble.

She’s not really a gamer, so she wasn’t familiar with certain conventions in games like these. Also, when something extremely unexpected or frightening happens on screen, her reaction is often akin to ‘run in circles, scream, and shout.’ The combination of these two things has resulted in extreme hilarity on a number of occasions. The first time she fell into deep water was absolutely priceless.

In real life, if you don’t know how to swim and you’re plunged into deep water, you panic. Your body operates on instinct – your legs stop moving, your arms thrash about, and you do anything to keep your head above water. Even experienced swimmers will resort to this position if they get exhausted in the water. This is what tells a lifeguard that the swimmer is in distress and in danger of drowning.

When Phil first fell into the Potomac, her reaction was kind of like that. Becki didn’t know what would happen. She was still mastering the controls, and when she leaped into the river, she sank several feet below the surface right away. An O2 meter appeared on the screen and began to tick downward at an alarming rate. It didn’t take a genius to realize that once those bars ran out, Phil would soon perish unless she suddenly mutated gills. Of course, the solution is to swim to the water’s surface. Becki did not know how to do this – there was no tutorial for swimming, after all. She completely freaked out. She turned to me for help, asking questions in a shrill, panicked voice. Of course, I was useless to her then, dying from laughter as I was. “Babe? BABE!?” she screamed, mashing buttons and trying to learn how to swim. She swung the baseball bat uselessly, as if trying to beat the O2 bar into submission as she had so many raiders, mole rats, and bloatflies. But no, this was not an enemy that could be vanquished so easily. Bullets were useless underwater. The bat, she did nothing! Fortunately, my girl’s quick thinking and cool head under pressure led her to the solution: look up toward the surface, walk in that direction, and punch your dick boyfriend in the arm for laughing so hard.

Phil also turned out to be a bit of a hoarder. Becki started to pick up and carry absolutely everything she could find. Who knows? One day, Phil might need that assortment of bent tin cans, lawn gnomes, and empty Nuka-Cola bottles! That fission battery might weigh 25 pounds and be worth a measly 50 caps, but come on. It’ll come in handy at some point. Fortunately, Becki learned about the Rock-It-Launcher (a weapon that fires junk at high velocities), and it became her gun of choice for the low levels. Mostly because she always had a crapton of ammo for it. Early in the game, we had a number of conversations that went something like this:

Her: “I’m overencumbered again?”

Me: “Check out your inventory, let’s see what you’ve got. Okay, guns, bullets, a few articles of clothing, and… mutilated organs? Where did you even get these?”

Her: “SHUT UP, I MIGHT NEED THEM LATER.”

I have mostly kept faithful to my pledge not to interfere with her experience, but I must admit that I had a great time messing with her in a number of spots. For instance, at one point, she was exploring a random Vault. There was some sort of unnatural compound in the air that made her character experience strange hallucinations. When these occurred, I pretended not to see them. Because, you know… I’m an asshole. This somehow made the experience absolutely harrowing for poor Phil. Every time one of the insane survivors struck her from the darkness, she would squeal with terror and panic for several seconds while the emaciated vault-dweller tried in vain to pierce her hardened Mk. II powered armor with his nailboard, fumbling with the controls until she could gather her wits and cut him down with a hail of minigun bullets.

I regret nothing. It was absolutely hilarious. Though I should note that similar efforts have been less successful since – Becki has learned that when it comes to advice in this game, I am not to be trusted. When I say things like “Did that Ghoul just hit you? You’re infected!” or “Can’t reach that ledge? Try a rocket jump!”, it doesn’t get the same rise out of her that it used to.

Unfortunately, Phil’s myriad life stresses led her to experiment with drugs and alcohol. I suppose my scare tactics must have played some part in this, an admission which gives me no pleasure. She suffers from an addiction to beer (no other alcohol – just beer) and buffout. The desire to be able to carry just a few more pounds of stuff led her down dark roads, and at this point, there’s very little she won’t do for just another sip of sweet, delicious beer to chase down that Buffout tablet. What would Phil’s father say about his daughter’s chemical stress relief if he were still alive? It’s only a matter of time before she discovers Jet and Med-X. Poor, misguided Phil…

Phil gets called a lot of things. Many people refer to her as the Last, Best Hope for the Wasteland, but what would they say if they knew the truth? What would they say if they’d heard Phil mutter atrocious things like ‘I wonder if it’s possible to make humanity extinct in this game?’ What would they say?

They should be worried. Their savior has become… somewhat unhinged. And she has a Heavy Incinerator.

Ahem.

She’s still barely scratched the surface of the gameworld, and she still has all the DLC left to play, not to mention New Vegas. Good times. Plus, this has proven to be an excellent diversion as I work to finish this draft of my second novel. It makes me smile to watch her enjoy the same experiences I had all that time ago, though I am starting to become a little afraid of her. I won’t get really worried until she finds a Gatling Laser in Real Life, though.

I apologize in advance for the extreme length of this post. Also, while I’ve tried to keep this relatively spoiler-free, I can’t promise 100% success.

So, over a year ago, Dragon Age: Origins came out. All I knew about it at the time was that it was an RPG set in an original fantasy setting, and that it was developed by Bioware. That last bit was essentially what sold it for me. I love RPGs as a genre in part because it lends itself to great storytelling, and the writing for Bioware games has been consistently decent since I first installed Baldur’s Gate. They have been rewarded for their dedication to quality stories and settings with a rather large fan base, and I am a member of it. I bought DA:O as soon as it came out and fully expected to be entertained. I was not disappointed – I was sucked in, hurled a good 30 hours at the game on my first playthrough, and enjoyed myself immensely.

So, as you might imagine, when Dragon Age 2 was announced, I was absolutely stoked.

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So alternate worlds, accessible by portals or somesuch other Clarke’s law tech, have become something of a cliche in Fantasy and Science Fiction. If you’re on this blog, then you almost certainly know what I’m talking about. The idea is that every time you make a decision, another world plays out from that point. Except in this one, you made the other decision, and your life proceeds from there. Across many other worlds-slash-dimensions, then, there are zillions of other Edward Clarks out there who have made other life choices and are currently existing in a vastly different set of circumstances. In one, I might have majored in Employment and be happily running away on the hamster wheel of my chosen career path. In another, I might be a homeless Meth addict. It’s interesting enough to think about – how would my life be different if I’d made another choice along the way? Would it be better? Worse?

A related question: If you could go back in time and make another choice, would you?

For me, the answer to this question is no. I like my life and I like where it’s going. Reading lots of science fiction has me paranoid that making a seemingly minor choice will have major consequences in my life later on, and I wouldn’t want to risk fucking up my perfectly good life by choosing not to tattle on Charlie Eelman for putting acorns in the urinal in the 5th grade. I’m not entirely sure how my choice to whine to the teacher about this prevented me from becoming a smack addict, but hey, who am I to think that I could meddle with causality and make things turn out ‘better?’ It’s not worth the potential risk of getting played by Ashton Kutcher in the film adaptation.

Anyway, rather than dissect Mr. Kutcher’s cautionary tale on the subject, what prompted this post was my reflection on a pair of life decisions that completely changed the course of my future and have come to define me for the last two years. These were two Moments of Truth, where I was faced with a difficult decision and could have gone one way or the other on either of them. My choices at these junctures have had a profound effect on my life and relationship.

The first came around graduation in 2008. I was still living in Britain. It was a few days before the ceremony, at which point I would be given my degree in Psychology as well as a handshake and a formal request to GTFO and go back to my country of origin. My plan was to move out to Idaho for a year after I graduated and cut my teeth in the real world there. There was just one problem. I was in love with a British girl, one of my friends throughout university, and she did not know it. I had lived with her and a few other friends in my fourth year at St. Andrews, and though I had known her for more than three years at that point, I’d only been harboring romantic feelings for her for a few months.

It was still a few days before my parents came out to see me, so we were hanging out in her apartment in Edinburgh to pass the time. We went out to dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe that night, but it wasn’t really a date. Because we were friends and had been for years, the whole affair could be explained that way if I decided to pussy out and keep my feelings a secret. That was my choice. I had resolved to tell her how I felt about her that evening, yet my defensive subconscious had been engaged in a guerilla war with my mind for hours leading up to the event as it tried to convince me not to put my self esteem at risk. Because it was at risk. I had been dropping hints since the beginning of the summer, but she had not responded to them in ways that I could call favorable. If she did feel the same way, she did not show it. So I did not think the odds of her reciprocating my affection were very high at all. If that were the case, why confess it in the first place? Doing so could put up a barrier between us and risk what had been, up to then, an awesome friendship. Why risk ruining that if I didn’t think she felt that way about me?

Because she deserved the truth, and because I knew I’d regret it forever if I didn’t. This was my best shot. If I chose not to show her my hand then, I would leave the country soon afterwards and possibly never get another opportunity. I wanted to tell her, yet it was extremely frightening. I did not know how she would react, and I had convinced myself that it would not be favorable. ‘I’m flattered but don’t feel the same way’ was, I thought, the best I could hope for. If I chose to confess my feelings, it would be my Pickett’s Charge – brave, yet foolish and perhaps futile.

But I found my courage, somehow, and I told her. It shocked her. She felt the same way. We spent the night cuddling on her bare bed, using an oversized towel for a blanket. I was absolutely astonished – it was everything I hoped for and the last thing I expected.

It could have easily gone the other way. In some other universe, I chose not to tell her, and I slowly lost touch with her over the next several months. I pity that other me. I wish that he’d found his bravery. Now, he probably plays World of Warcraft and is still wondering just what the hell he’s going to do with his life. Maybe he has some direction, but he’s not entirely certain of it. He definitely regrets his decision to keep his thoughts to himself that fateful evening in Edinburgh, because he probably isn’t truly happy.

Another similar day came later that year. I did end up going back to the States, because my visa expired and I had to go home and apply for a new one. I went to Idaho as planned, got a crappy job, and worked while I waited for it to go through. Long distance relationships don’t come with a training manual. A couple of things made this difficult. Firstly, there is a seven hour time difference between Idaho and Britain. This means that it’s hard to stay in touch as a couple if you both work. The timezones meant that when her work hours were ending, mine were just beginning and when mine were ending, she was asleep. If I didn’t specifically pick a schedule that would allow us to talk to each other, the awful truth is that we may not have made it.

Anyway, I was an idiot about it for a while. I’d fail to respond to IMs. I’d go for a day or more without talking to her because our time slots just wouldn’t line up. I didn’t realize at the time that in a relationship, regular contact is incredibly important. It’s not enough to chat to each other once in a while on IMs or send emails every other day. You need to get as close to face-to-face as possible – video chat, or at least voice chat. And it needs to be regular. I didn’t realize it at the time, but by doing these things and failing to follow through, I was really hurting her.

One day, she called me. She was in tears. She was about to come out for six weeks, and while we were both quite excited about this, she was worried that I was losing interest. She didn’t want to come out and live in a foreign country for a month and a half just to have this fall apart. She told me that it would break her heart. If that’s what I thought was going to happen, she said, then she might as well cancel the trip.

While she was talking, I started to see how my behavior was affecting her. I started to see that I’d wounded her, that I was continuing to hurt her. I was ashamed. I still feel ashamed as I write this, even now. She asked me a direct question: did we have what it takes? Was it worth risking her heart to come out here? A craven part of me wanted to tell her that I wasn’t sure. That maybe we should hold off, that maybe this wouldn’t work out. Because what we were about to do was risky. We hadn’t been dating for very long, and she was about to move in with me for six weeks – unfortunately, when you’re young, poor, and live thousands of miles away, you don’t have the resources to indulge in half measures like keeping separate places while you feel each other out. Part of me did not want to risk it. I didn’t know whether things would work out or not, and taking that chance seemed frightening.

But despite that fear, I urged her to come out. I’d started to see where I was screwing up and assured her that I could change, and that all we needed was time together and we could make it work. It wasn’t the safe option for either of us, but we decided to take the plunge and see if we could fall in love. We had a great time over those six weeks. We were just as compatible as I remembered. We made a schedule and stuck to it, too, and we managed to keep the relationship alive and healthy long enough for my visa to be approved.

But somewhere, in another universe, there is a version of me that chose the safe path and missed out on a wonderful, fulfilling journey over the next few years. Maybe he still works that shitty job in Ketchum. Maybe he ended up overstaying his welcome in Idaho, or maybe he ended up moving on and setting out on his own after all. I hope he’s doing well. I hope both of them are, in fact.

Though I do pity them.

Sometimes, it keeps me awake at night to think about how close I came to being those guys. I got lucky, I often think to myself. Though those decisions have been made, and everything turned out for the best, it is still not comforting to me to know that so much of the happiness that I now take for granted is the result of two small, almost whimsical acts of courage and a great deal of luck. In these moments, I’ll look over at the beautiful woman sleeping next to me, kiss her on the cheek, and promise myself that I won’t ever take her for granted. I’ll never let myself forget how close I came to never being with her at all.

I love you, Becki. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Messing around with Ubuntu while troubleshooting my coworker’s laptop inspired me. I did a bunch of things to his machine that I’d only read and theorized about before, such as swapping out memory modules, repairing OS files, and installing Linux on his machine to verify that there weren’t any hardware faults.

Now, screwing around with the guts of your computer is a nerve-wracking experience if you’re new to it. Any mistake has the potential to be very, very expensive. Many of those parts are easily ruined by accidental exposure to static electricity or spilled coffee, so it’s not hard to imagine doing a thousand bucks worth of damage in a single careless moment. The same goes with meddling with the computer’s OS or filesystem. It’s arguably even more dangerous if you haven’t done a full backup of the hard drive or are troubleshooting a system you can’t boot – one of the maxims I had drilled into me while studying this stuff in the first place was ‘What’s the most expensive part of a computer? The data.’ If you mess around with the master boot record, then, you run the risk of rendering all that data inaccessible or irretrievable.

Obviously, there are ways to mitigate the damage here and cover your own ass. Still, if you’ve never done it before, this can be quite frightening. Even if you make all the right preparations, you can end up having to reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything, which is a complete pain in the rear even if you don’t end up losing your files. An experienced technician has little to fear here, but I am not one of these, so the thought of rendering my computer unbootable still makes me quake.

My success with the laptop last week emboldened me. While I was installing Ubuntu on my coworker’s computer to see if it would work, I saw that there was an option for ‘installing Ubuntu side-by-side with the existing operating system.’ Well! Why couldn’t I do that, then? Surely, I had enough knowhow to make my computer dual-bootable. Then, I’d be able to mess with Linux to my heart’s content. This would accomplish a couple different things:

1. Making my machine dual-boot capable seemed like something of a rite of passage for computer nerds to me. It’s totally possible, even easy if you’ve got the knowhow, yet there’s enough of a risk element involved to put off newb techs like me.
2. Messing with Linux could teach me a lot about how computers work and how to get them to do what I want. My best friend from the States tells me that playing with Ubuntu has taught him a great deal, and I believe him.
3. Gushing about how awesome Linux is is a great way to increase my geek cred, increase my sexual attractiveness, and impress my girlfriend. Probably. Maybe. Okay, no it isn’t, but she’ll come around once she sees how undeniably sexy Open Source is.
4. Lastly, and most importantly, I want to use my Linux partition as a web development playground. Becki recently bought me a book on PHP and MySQL, and I’ve also got a book on how to design Wordpress themes. I want to learn how to make dynamic websites. I want to have my Linux partition dedicated to this. Oh, sure, I could do it in Windows 7, but… but… dual boot…

Still, wanting it is not sufficient by itself to make it happen. I had my boot disc and I had a little bit of experience, but I knew I’d need to do a little bit more research than that. I penciled in a whole freakin’ evening for this. “Baby,” I said to my girl, whose patience I am endlessly grateful for. I spoke in my finest Middle Earth accent. “I’m off to tame a dragon. It’s name is Ubuntu, and I need to get the vikings together to make it obey me. I must succeed, for if I fail, the consequences will be dire indeed. Give me a kiss. I might not survive this.”

She did. “That’s nice, love,” she said to me. She is used to my crazy by now.

Alas! The dragon would be fierce, for I knew its cruel brood well, having wrestled with its gnarled cousin Windows many a time. ‘Twould be a battle worthy of song most boisterous ‘fore I could return to the arms of my fair, beloved lady. My sword was sharp and my will was strong, but I knew that this alone would not win the day. Nay, let it not be said that a warrior’s strength and arms are the measure of his prowess! A keen mind is the better of these things, the most valuable tool in the arsenal. I whetted mine intellect upon the ancient Tomes of Ubuntu hidden in the great Library of the Cloud, determined to equip myself with the knowledge I’d need to face and defeat the beast. Only then would I confront the dread lord Linux.

My heart raced and my hands trembled as I read, fearful of the battle to come, though my determination did not waver. I read. I learned. I asked the Oracle Google mine questions three, acquiver with terror as I awaited her answer. It took great fortitude to listen to her response to my queries. I winced at the words as she voiced them, my fist tightening around the pommel of my sword as she spoke.

Except… oh, wow, it was actually really easy.

First thing to do was shrink my Windows partition. I have a 500 GB hard drive and use a little less than half of that, so it was easy enough for me to set aside 25 gigs for an Ubuntu partition. I ran Disk Defragmenter, then opened the Disk Management utility in Windows. I selected the C: drive, then selected Actions, and then Shrink Volume. Entered the number I wanted to shrink it by – 25600 MB (1024MB x 25GB, if you care) – and let it work. Took about five minutes.

Next, I booted to my Ubuntu disc and told it that I wanted to Install Ubuntu. I’d done this before, so I knew that I’d be allowed the option to prevent it from overwriting my Windows 7 partition, but it still scared me a little. I wouldn’t lose anything if I blew it, unless you counted the afternoon I’d have to spend reinstalling everything, so I kept going. Besides, I’d gotten myself all worked up beforehand, so I wasn’t about to just stop.

I then anticipated some difficulty telling Linux which partition I wanted it to use. The installer came with its own inbuilt partitioning utility, but I’d never used it before, so I feared having to do it manually. Surely, if I did, I’d run the risk of killing my Windows install by accident. Yet I needn’t have worried, since there was an option to use the largest region of contiguous free space for my Ubuntu install – which just so happened to be the 25 GB I’d set aside especially for it, as indicated by the helpful graphic of the partitioning tool. Click. Forward. Done.

Then, it installed. It also added a boot tool at the beginning to let me pick which operating system I wanted to boot into when I started the computer. This was nice, because I’d been especially worried about this bit of the process, and the Ubuntu installer accomplished it automatically.

Then, I restarted the computer, selected Ubuntu as my desired hard drive, and booted into it for the first time. No errors. I restarted and went into Windows, too. No errors. I was done, and I’d succeeded.

The whole thing took me maybe an hour, including the time I spent changing into my viking outfit.

It was really, really easy. Certainly easier than sorting out that memory business a week ago. Ubuntu is really quite simple to install. Where Windows automatically assumes that you want to use it as your sole operating system, Ubuntu seems to be designed for people who want more flexibility at startup. It was simple as anything to make my machine dual-bootable. Can’t wait to play with it.

Next thing to do: install and configure XAMPP on an operating system I’ve little experience with.