another monday

Hello everyone. It's been a good morning so far for writing but my creativity has given out for the moment. This afternoon should also prove productive though. The weekend was alright but there were some damned slow boring hours there. On Saturday, I went with my parents to babysit Ava and Amia in Hamilton. They're certainly full of energy. We were all kept pretty busy by both the kids and their two kittens Pickles and Pumpkin. There were times when all four of the small creatures named above were around me wanting to examine my netbook and bag. Curiosity is certainly a trait widely shared in my brother's house. For a while, we went outside to their backyard where I pushed Ava and Amia together in a swing they have set up there. You could almost call the backyard a miniature park with its swings, sandbox, playhouse and three small slides.

Sunday started off pretty well with church. We had a guest preecher do the sermon. He's another fellow who works with The Dam, a nearby organisation which tries to help youths who are living troubled lives. I tried to volunteer for that organisation but was turned down because I couldn't commit to two years. I have no way to know for certain that a call from the folks in charge of affordable housing won't come before that long although it's probably a pretty safe bet that this will turn out to be the case. They're certainly in no rush to find me a place to live on my own which I can actually afford on ODSP. The only commitment I would be in a position to make would be one which either involved a secure fulltime job which let me afford my own place and got me off ODSP altogether, or a volunteer commitment somewhere which I could leave whenever affordable housing at last becomes available to me. If transportation there and back were provided, I would cheerfully offer whatever assistance I could as long as it gave me the opportunity to interact with people in person rather than through a damned keyboard. There are simply no such doors open to me. Slowly but surely, this frustrating circumstance is chipping away at me. It's eating away at my desire to even keep trying. The rest of Sunday crawled by uneventfully. My father has found a pre-mixed kind of Margareta which comes in tall thin cans. It's quite good and I enjoyed one over the course of the afternoon while chatting with people online. The DNTO podcast on flawes was also an interesting half-hour or so. I deeply miss having a special lady in life to go out and do things with especially on Summer weekends.

I just looked on eHarmony to see whether anything new had happened over the past while. Big mistake! That site is going to eat away at what little sense of fool's hope I have left of finding someone special. I just can't work up the motivation to check on that site regularly. I've started this guided communication process with well over sixty women now. All of them seemed quite promising from what they wrote in their profiles. However, pretty much all of them have found reasons to close off communications. I spent a good fifteen minutes going through and completing the closure process on my end for something like eleven or twelve of them this morning. I'm still technically waiting to hear from three or four but frankly don't ever expect to. Seeing as I paid a fairly high entry fee, I feel compelled to keep checking in and seeing whether anyone has so much as noticed me. It seems pretty damned pointless to invest time in looking for more people to fling multiple guess questions at. I'd merely be setting myself up for yet more rejection. The whole setup seems so badly out of kilter with its objective. It's so utterly demoralising. To engage in it is to truly stare one's sense of hopeless futility full in the face. Still, I suppose I ought to try it with a few more of the matches it throws at me if only to keep the balance of universal justice happy.

Meanwhile, I've posted my blog entry about my trip to Chicago on the Dating4Disabled site and have so far gotten pretty positive feedback. I have yet to hear from anybody close enough to have any hope of actually meeting but that seems to be true of most people whose blogs I've read on that site. They've formed a kind of online community of friends. That isn't at all what I'm ultimately after. However, on the off chance of striking it lucky, I'll keep posting my writing there once in a while. It seems to interest some of the folks and a lot of them seem in need of such distraction from their own solitude and boredom. There's just so much untapped human potential out there. I'm also still communicating with Nadia. She found me on another dating site which I was very close to abandonning. We hope to get together next tuesday. She's in the process of learning how to drive a modified car with hand controls since she's paralised from the waste down. Again though, the only reason that it's possible at all is my mother's willingness to take me out to a mall in Brampton. I'm very thankful that she's willing to do this but it certainly increases the nervousness of whoever decides to meet me. Nadia has to use Wheeltrans to get there so there's no room for being spontanious. It's damned frustrating not having my own place where I can invite people and not to be settled in a situation where I could more easily get around a community on my own meeting and interacting with people on my terms. I'm going to listen have another listen to the route my mobility instructor Ray and I finally succeeded in recording properly last week and then try to go father towards Symposium this afternoon. I helped my father close the cover on our swimming pool and it seems nice enough out there. Once I'm back from that, it'll be time to return to the design document of Enchantment's Twilight. I've come up with another approach to what could be an interesting early stage of the game. Until now, I had thought of players as each controlling a character in the wizard's trusted circle of leaders who form the island council. However, it might be interesting to have each player control a couple of possible candiates for these positions of honour. They would then have to go around the island earning favour, respect and popularity so that they might be chosen. Presuming I can contribe circumstances which properly balance cooperation and competition, this could indeed be a suitable way of introducing more randomness into the arc of the epic.