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One of the greatest reasons why I think it was and still is so easy to be a loner is because people generally suck. I can be definitive about the things that I like about people, because when someone is good, it stands out a lot. If anything, the good things about people are why you should hang out with them.
But as to why people suck? There's just as many reasons, but perhaps it can all broadly be summarized as inconsideration.
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I woke up one morning, it doesn't really matter which, earlier than expected because one of my roomies, [SoCool], was talking a bit too loudly on her cellphone. The specific morning when this happened doesn't matter, since it's a frequent occurance.

Even I have my limits though, and if there's one word I really hate to hear, it's "sorry." Sorry is just a way of expressing guilt-- but guilt if guilt isn't enough to make you change your ways, then perhaps I need to be more explicit.

SoCool is 21 years old and like most people I know her age, she thinks she's got a perfect grasp on her world. In many ways, she's probably right, at least in the sense that she's got a grasp on the world at least as far as she sees it. She's got her rules about the ways to do things, and she considers herself a leader in our little household-- but sometimes, it's everything I can do to keep my tongue and not just explode on her because sometimes, she can be a self-righteous bitch. I don't say this to look down on her, because we are all in our own little worlds in our own ways, and it's always hard to see beyond our scope of experiences.

She has, for example, this thing about dishes in the sink. "I can't cook when there are things in the sink," she says. But the thing is, somehow it's okay as long as the sink is empty right before she's cooking, but if she or [Terminator] are leaving dishes until a later time, it's alright if there are dishes in the sink before I need to cook. Or, there's that she calls herself OCD for cleanliness, and I admit that's probably true, she uses a crapload of household cleaners all the time for just about anything, but she's go no sense of clutter-detection. Her laptop is always everywhere, she leaves bottles around. There's always some sorta stuff in the living room that fly just under her radar.

Now, you're probably wondering why I don't say anything-- the main reason is that I'm trying a different approach. In the past, whenever anyone crossed me, I'd tell them off to their face and be done with it. I'd have no regrets-- if you pissed me off enough, we didn't need to be friends. We'd go our separate ways. It's not a question of someone being better or worse than your expectations, it's just incompatibility, plain and simple. I would prune you right out of my life if you didn't change.

But in this case, she's not someone who I can just cut out of my life, because she's [Terminator]'s girlfriend. I think that in my head, she still shows up on my radar as "Terminator's girlfriend" before she shows up as "my friend" because there are parts of her personality that I don't really feel I need to put up with-- I guess what it comes down to is that she's not the kind of buddy I normally keep, and living with her causes me a fair amount of headaches (literally, since I'm sleep deprived because of her). It's somewhat out of respect for Terminator that I don't start skirmishes in our little household. That, and I guess that aside from her habits, she's actually kinda fun to be around. I just don't like hearing her hippocritic passive aggressive nagging about my domestic cleaning habits.

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I have a lot of respect for Terminator because of the training we've done together for years on end. It's not quite a decade that we've known eachother, but when you meet someone who follows a regimen of discipline and substance like he does, there's no guesswork involved in determining the nature of his character.

I find it's difficult for me though, because I feel that I compartmentalize most of my friends. That is to say, I only refer to them for certain subjects of discussion or activity. While it's true that naturally, each of your friends has some sort of particular thing about them which is why you hang out with them, I guess what I'm saying is that after Zanshin stayed in SK and I moved back to Montreal, it's been difficult to really connect with a bro who takes as much as he gives.

I guess it's natural that Terminator and I don't actually hang out very much, despite that we have a great deal of respect for eachother-- we both have different interests, different jobs, astoundingly different views on life.

But who knows-- maybe at the end of the day, I'm still that loner who I thought I'd evolved from, because most of the time, it doesn't bother me.

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with my family of friends, I expect that people will not only be there to bail you out, but to be there when the problems go down in the first place. There's something to be said about the time shared among us, or the lack thereof.

Frankly, I just haven't been organizing things for the group lately, and that's that-- I used to do it all the time, almost on a weekly basis, making time to try and coordinate everyones' schedules-- but nowadays, I just don't do it as much. And you know what? Nobody's calling me back. I guess that makes me somewhat of a sucker, don't it? Yeah look at me, whining at 3AM that I'm underappreciated for all the shit I put up with.

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It's true that if you have expectations, there's only two ways for that to go-- either they'll be fullfilled, which is what you expected so you don't think twice about it, or you're let down, in which case it's something that's hard to erase from your mind because it's so distinct as an event.

It's not that I need the attention of friends-- but friends should make time for eachother, simply, and it should be a two way street.

Which leads me to believe that perhaps I should suck it up and start making new friends.
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Time: 4:18AM Dec 2, 2009
Morale: MOTHERfugger you came this close *THIS CLOSE*

And speaking of things I don't like about people,
it's when people try to intimidate me. Let me get one thing straight-- I don't get intimidated by most people. I do get scared, I am human, but there's a difference between you intimidating me and be getting scared. Initimdation has to do with the means by which someone tries to scare me-- meaning, they try to use big words, aggressive body language and things, verbal abuse, volume, negative energy, basically: they're trying to make themselves seem big and me feel small. It translates to someone using their 'qi' to oppress your spirit and bend you to their will.

When someone at the hospital gets in my face, and by in my face, I mean their face is within a foot of mine and they're yelling at me, possibly pointing a finger this close to me, I don't feel intimidate. I am, however, scared and I am definately on edge. This isn't because of the threat you pose to me-- there are always threats in this line of business I think, especially at 4:30AM when people are tired. I'm not worried about you hurting me, to be honest. Not only am I fairly certain that you aren't going to be able to land a good hit on me, but I'm also rather certain that in most cases, I will be able to take that hit and still take you down if not kill you. Yes, kill you.

And that's what I'm scared about. I didn't learn martial arts so I could get into a fistfight with a parent of a potential patient a children's hospital. I learned martial arts because it was something fun to do, something recreational. It turned into something I could use to keep my body and mind in sync, including all those dark thoughts that tell me it actually is fun to hurt people. I am not intimidated because of the threat you pose to my physically-- in fact, that threat is laughable. But with every degree of escalated agression, and with every of my attempts to calm you down that fails, you are coming closer and closer to forcing me into a situation that could make me hurt you very badly you in self deffense.

I could beat up aggressive parents every night for all I care; parents who are getting agressive are almost always in the wrong. It wouldn't be good for promotional prospects at my job though.

It seems that every week or two, I need a hardcore 'maintenance' day. I treat myself like a computer, it's like doing diagnostics on everything. Registry cleaning, defragging, virus scanning, the works. Or maybe it's more accurate that I treat myself like a character in an RPG, and every now and then I overestimate just how much a human mind, body and spirit can take.

Last Friday was one such day. Maintenance comes in some pretty strange forms though, and I guess from person to person it varies.

Ninja Assasin. That movie turned out to be pretty much everything I expected it to be-- outrageous fight scenes, awful scripting. In combination, it was a fun experience. [Supergirl] was talking to her friends about movies a few days before seeing the movie with me, and her friend was commenting along the lines of what about that movie Ninja Assasin! Only stupid people would want to watch that! and yeah, that's me! It was fun and there were scenes where Supergirl next to me was practically covering her eyes, some of the scenes in that movie were so extreme. And I don't even always mean the scenes where they were killing things-- the 'romance' scenes in the movie were pretty ass kicking too. This movie really just reset my brain in a good mood after a week of work, culminating with that 11 hour FT shift from hell.

I suppose it goes without saying, but Supergirl is a part of my maintenance too. I don't mean 'maintenance' in the way we sometimes talk about those little things we have to do for our girlfriends just to keep them happy-- I mean, on the contrary, that spending time around her just fixes everything wrong with my day. I think the when I got into this relationship the thing I did right, as well as the thing I did wrong, is that I had no expectations. It was the right thing to do because then when I met Supergirl, I think I did a pretty good job of just taking her as she was. Unlike with previous relationships, I didn't try to change her or try to fix her life in any way that she didn't want to (at least not that I know of yet). That was probably the most significant problem with me when I was going out with [BadMedicine] or [Chamchikimbap].

On the other hand, it's also that Supergirl doesn't need me to take care of anything in her life really. And that's very different. I guess it's just that she's got her shit together, because she's got it together, and for everything else, it's as if our priorities are in sync.

It's was a mistake to not have any expectations because I think that expectations are what make a relationship grow in a sense, but now that I've got a better idea of who she is, I guess the truth is that I'm developing them. Maybe that's the way it should be done? See the situation first, and then see what can be done with it. Rephrased in terms of relationships, perhaps it is to start a relationship, build the foundations, and then start setting goals together.




Time: 2:00AM November 30th
Location: @work, in the crash room
Batteries: 90% (I've been sleeping a crapload during my day and a half off work)

"ECKSRAYS! ECKSRAYS!"

[JoD]: "Clear for x-rays!"

Eveyone shuffles out of the way hurriedly.

"Man, do you think they could give us more warning next time?" I ask.

"It's okay," mumbles one of the nurses. "Those were just my ovaries! Who needs kids anyhow."

Everyone laughs. Well, that is, everyone except the kid on the table.

Sometime early this morning, a 16 year old boy, while driving his girlfriend around, managed to somehow wrap his car around a cement block. The girlfriend wobbles out of the car in the freezing rain, took a few steps, then passed out. The boyfriend is still unconscious when he gets into our crash room, and nobody knows why because, despite the horrific state of his car, he's not obviously hurt in any way.

But they figure that it might be some combination of the crash and what the police suggest may be drugs they expect to find in his system once the blood tests come back.

An interesting development that [Dr. N] pointed out-- such an event is now called an MVC, instead of the old term, the MVA. What's the difference? The old term stood for "Motor Vehicle Accident," but has since been recently ammended to "Motor Vehicle Crash." Its mostly a philosphoical difference, but the gist of it is that nothing that happens when you're behind the wheel is an accident-- there's always something you could have done to prevent it. There are no accidents.

He's in the crash room for about an hour and a half, and I'm there thinking, man. They make 16 year olds /big/ nowadays. He's probably a head taller than me and lean. What do they put in cafeteria meals that they didn't have when I was in highschool?

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Time: 4:22 AM
Batteries: 75%
Location: @work

When I look at the last decade of my life years of my life from about the time that I was that kid's age, I really changed quite a bit.

I ask what is it that they put in cafeteria meals jokingly that makes that kid that tall-- but the fact is that at his age, I was probably just as dumb as this kid on the table.

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Time: 5:29 PM
Location: @home
Batteries: 99% (I just woke up)

See, the thing is, when I was his age, I wasn't driving yet, but within a few years I would be drinking, playing arcades, and fighting on concrete. How many times did I have a few strained ligaments ? How many times did I have a bone broken? A joint dislocated? And how many of those times was it a neck or head injury, just like the kind that the kid now needed a Miami-J collar to stabilize?

When I went to Emergency at the Montreal General Hospital for the first time after the first Dawson/Marianopolis tournament we organized because it looked like I was bleeding from my eye, because I'd gotten punched in the eye one too many times and I'd burst blood vessels all about the inside of it and they were afraid that my retina might detach, could I write on a form that it was an accident?

That the person I was contending against only 'accidentally' hit me in the eye that many times?

Or could we say that this situation could have been prevented-- I could have done like my mom always said-- that is to say, never done martial arts in the first place, and just taken the time to do this or that homework project better and become a better student.

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There's a bit of a duality to the way I philosophically look at the purpose of a hospital, and it follows, in some sense, a philosophy of gaming. The hospital where I work at, or any of them for that matter, is, within limits, a way of healing you. Sure, that's obvious. But just as there there are first aid kits, potions and inns in games that can always bring you back from the worst of redline situations, there are some plot-device situations where you become forever crippled, or worse still, you die.

A hospital comes with a cautionary tale. Everytime you go there, medical and non-medical staff will make jokes about you. It's a given. We'll goad you or your parents for being so stupid and not preventing this thing that's happened to you. But on the other hand, that's just what you have to accept-- you will make mistakes, and not only that, you will have to live with them and suffer the ridicule of it. If only you were conscious to hear what we say about you. But deep down, we believe that the work is important because people would like an extra life. Everyone does. Everyone wants extra chances. I don't believe that there's anything like karma within the span of a single lifetime-- because I think that after a certain amount of time elapsed between two seemingly oppositely charged 'karmaic' events, it's just coincidence, and there's no real sense of deserving except in the convention of a legal sense upheld by society. But I do believe that we serve this initiative, of giving people extra chances, because deep down we want more continues of our own.

In a sense, the reason why we keep doing this, is, in a sense: to encourage stupidity.

Could you imagine if everyone played things safely? Look at a Mario Bros game. If you had a single life, and you could never be brought back, would you even risk jumping over that hole? What if you slipped? It'd be all over. Nothing would happen if we didn't have some capacity for risk survival. And, well, if we just stood there and did nothing, the timer would eventually drain to zero and we'd die anyhow.

Because if I'm ever to get anything out of life, it's giong to be through those ambiguous situations where I've got to take a risk and try something different. Because that's how we learn, that's how we grow.

I don't mean this exclusively in terms of physical injuries and physical lessons. I mean this in terms of everything. No matter what decision you make, you can strike gold, you can get something very uninteresting compared to what you thought, or you could get something worse. Maybe you're just shuffling the cards, and for some things you win some things you lose.

That's just the way it works I suppose-- so we have systems in place to pick up the pieces. People say "why don't you learn from your mistakes" but what people don't always realize when judging others is that no situation is always the same, and if someone makes the 'same mistake' more than once it might be because they think this is the right thing to do, and they're just waiting for a lucky break that has nothing to do with them so that it finally works out.

Sometimes it's not even that dramatic. I mean, it's all about practice I suppose. You try to isolate variables, figure out how the system works, and then work towards your goals. Some people just seem more like idiots than others, but it's a continuum really from risk/security, just like in investing. I guess the real importance is to be systematic, and the paradigm by which we do so is who we are.