Hello everyone. Happy Canada Day. It's approaching five o'clock as I write this blog entry. I'm at last able to sit comfortably out on my balcony. No noisy construction wrecks the experience. Nore are too many jets flying over. It's very peaceful with a jentle wind blowing in over the rail. Last weekend, I went on a camping trip with Ron and his friends. Despite the rain, it was a splendid outing. I met some very interesting people and had an excellent time. As we all get older, things are losing that wild quality they once had. That suits me just fine but the down side is I can't rely on these trips to cure my insomnia. Last night, I enjoyed my first really good sleep in quite some time.
Things are going quite well lately. I've started my mobility lessons and am now concentrating on learning to reach the TD Bank which is near the Meadowvale Town Centre. It'll probably take four or five more lessons or so to really nail that down. The only area where things are going horridly is in my writing. Blog entries and emails are one thing but creatively, I'm in the middle of the longest droubt I've known and feel like it'll take a miracle to unlock things again. I've sat for hours trying to write anything creatively but have nothing to show for my efforts at all. The only thing left to do is to simply stop trying for the next while and try to simply enjoy things. With the nice weather, I've been doing more with people outdoors. That side of life is finally starting to shape up. This evening, I think I'll head down and see if people are celebrating around Lake Aquitain or perhaps at the community centre on the way to the mall. The rest of the weekend will be more family oriented. My grandmother is arriving some time tonight. We'll be doing various things over the next while with her. Poor Ava is ill at the moment so I don't know whether we'll be seeing Dan and his family or not. We'll also be seeing other friends of the family. It's nice not to have an empy long weekend staring me in the face. Think I'll get this posted and continue to enjoy it. Happy Canada Day everyone.
Showing posts with label writer's block. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writer's block. Show all posts
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Monday, September 28, 2009
insomnia and writer's block strike again
Hello everyone. As the title of this entry indicates, it looks like I'm in for another scrap with insomnia unless I really get lucky sleep-wise over the next while. What really twigged me to this was yesterday in church. I started to notice that my voice sounded deeper, less cheerful and more listless than it usually does to my own ears. It only hit home towards the end of my time there. Suddenly, I thought back to how often I had gotten up either much later or earlier than usual over the past week. Particularly when there's no real routine in life, insomnia has an incidious way of sneaking up on you. So many days since this whole chapter in life after Janene left me have been the same. Too damned similar and too damned solitary. I've put so much effort into changing that over the Summer but have gotten absolutely nowhere other than coming away with a few more people to email or talk to at a distance. I even tried interjecting myself into a conversation in Symposium I overheard as I prepared to head home. Big mistake. Janene seemed to do it so effortlessly but I figure there must be visual cues I'm missing there. I felt intrusive and likely just made an ass of myself. I'll still absolutely enjoy meals I have there despite the lack of company. I'm also getting to know the staff a bit better. However, I think it's safe to say that Symposium is a good place to bring people who you've somehow met elsewhere to. The next time I luck out and a woman near enough takes an interest in me, I'll have somewhere to meet her at which isn't my parent's house. That, of course, presupposes that I'll actually be noticed by someone near enough to visit and interested in at least friendship. You just really feel the irony when you meet people on the way to and from there who have all sorts of time to help you but none to get to know you. To have so many interests, be as open and outgoing as I am, and still have nobody to really share that with in person is damned frustrating and painful in a fundamental way. If there were a group of people around my age I could join even once per week for socialisation or some shared interest, it would help a great deal. There doesn't seem to be anything like that though. Everyone else on the planet seems to be too busy, already taken, or too damned far away.
This round of insomnia is definitely going to make the next while drag painfully. However, after what I went through when Janene broke up with me, the real danger is that I might underestimate it and let it get the upper hand. Nothing seems anywhere near as bad in comparison. Of course, I could get extremely lucky, have a few nights of good sleep and avoid it entirely. I'd have an easier time hoping for that were there more substance in my life. when there's nobody special who might want to go out somewhere, no job other than the massive project I've set for myself, and no real reason even to shave other than the dread of how damned bothersome it'll be after a few days of not doing so, it's too easy to slip into bored oblivion. As much as possible, I know I have to keep my spirits up and try to be ready for any unexpected experiences, people, or opportunities which God might send my way. Until I've fully recovered from this, I won't touch a drop of alcohol. Having it become the master of me is just not on. As always, I'll face my rough patches with a sober head. I doubt that having my usual maximum of one drink in an ordinary day would actually do any real damage. However, it isn't something I'm willing to chance. Fortunately, I'm very well stocked with podcasts, a couple of books, and whatever digital cable TV might have to offer over the next while. As long as I don't sink to that utterly torturous point where I can't focus my mind on anything, I ought to be able to get through this. If I'm very lucky, I might come away with ideas which rid me of the writer's block which has once again gotten me in its clutches. One can only hope and pray. I'm hopeful that I might be able to write down a concise version of my story for a person on a listserve I belong to where everyone is on ODSP. A collection of a thousand such stories is being collected in order to be sent to parliament in hopes that they might make a difference. That list is a kind of perverse comfort as most people who are on it have far bigger issues to deal with than I do. A lot of them have gotten into deep financial trouble, have obvious mental illness, and have become estranged from their families. There's a whole lot of utter misery out there which I know I've fortunately managed to avoid. My circumstances certainly constrain me and prevent me from engaging more fully with life. It's extremely frustrating but at least I know that my basic needs are covered. Some of these people might actually go off the rails and truly flip out. In fact, reading some of the stories which have been posted, a number of them actually have done so. I hope that my somewhat less dire story does somebody some good.
Rather than saving the various new rpg books I purchased in anticipation of a long, dull and lonely winter, I fear I'll have to start in on them earlier once this bout with insomnia is behind me. There's some hope that Atlantice Found and Subterainian, the two fictional books which seem interesting enough to help me through the next few days, may offer enough ideas which I can adapt for Enchantment's Twilight so I won't have to dig into books like the GURPS basic manual and other such sources until winter time.
Not a lot has happened over the past while. Dad's off golfing for the week and hopefully enjoying his yearly trip. Mom certainly has plenty to keep her occupied babysitting the grandkids, visiting friends, and doing her painting. I can only hope I'm that lucky when I'm her age. At times like this, it's all to easy to imagine the next thirty years going by without anything getting better for me. Short of resourting to the utterly absurd or downright criminal, there just doesn't seem to be any way to change life. I'm really not cut out for either the absurd or the criminal. You'd think I'd have sufficient cause for that kind of anger or disenchantment with society at large. However, there's that small issue of empathy. I want to be remembered for the good things I've managed to do, for being a good friend, and hopefully, for being there when I'm needed. That's just how i was made. I just have to keep ready, keep knocking on doors and wait for things to finally change. I know they will eventually. Over the shorter term, there's more social occasions at church and our upcoming trip to Winnipeg. That'll make for a nice change of pace. Also, after I'm back from that trip, I'm going to check out Mississauga Community Living as well as the local police to see if there might be any way I could be of use to those organisations. My brother thought that it might be a good idea for me to get in touch with the police since they'd certainly have the vehicles to get me to wherever they might be able to make use of me. I hadn't thought of that idea before. It's certainly worth pursuing once we're back. Having such things in the future helps a lot. I know I won't sink too far down. It's still damned annoying to have days like this where I feel this lethargic.
I caught the first episode of Flash Forward last week. It's good enough to give the next couple episodes a try. Robert J. Sawyer seems very happy with how it turned out. While I'm certainly happy for him, it just didn't hook me in all that profoundly. The book was ever so much better. I spent most of a day and a part of another rereading the book. I also listened to Crazy Dog Audio Theatre's The Stuff of Myth. It's a kind of musical commedy which I found mildly amusing. I've picked up a few new audio dramas from ZBS Audio in order to help pass some time. That raises the whole problem of my fear of becoming too much of a consumer. I'm spending money on things in order to pass time that I'd much rather spend in the company of others. There's just nothing else to do though. It's either that or sit there bored out of my skull with nothing at all new to occupy me in solitude. Podcasts, games, online discussions, documentaries and the like are the square pegs I'm sticking into round holes. Helpful but never entirely satisfactory. I need some way to connect with the wider community around me rather than all these people I'm never going to meet. You have that sense of actually making a difference when you're in a relationship. You also find it if you're lucky enough to have a meaningful career. As a single man limited in his ability to get places, the only time I find that satisfaction is occasionally through friends or when I complete one of my projects and hear from the people who it has made a difference for. Enchantment's Twilight will certainly have a good impact when it's at last ready but its such a large undertaking that I need to find something else in the interim.
There's a hellish kind of gloom hanging over me. I know intelectually that things must eventually get better. Affordable housing will finally come through and I'll actually have a place of my own if nothing else. This dark tunnel will at last end or change radically in character. It just seems like such a damned long walk through a thick fog which cancels out one's efforts. I've literally done everything possible to change things and have gotten nowhere. It's truly in God's hands now. I'm as ready and able to serve as I can be.
This round of insomnia is definitely going to make the next while drag painfully. However, after what I went through when Janene broke up with me, the real danger is that I might underestimate it and let it get the upper hand. Nothing seems anywhere near as bad in comparison. Of course, I could get extremely lucky, have a few nights of good sleep and avoid it entirely. I'd have an easier time hoping for that were there more substance in my life. when there's nobody special who might want to go out somewhere, no job other than the massive project I've set for myself, and no real reason even to shave other than the dread of how damned bothersome it'll be after a few days of not doing so, it's too easy to slip into bored oblivion. As much as possible, I know I have to keep my spirits up and try to be ready for any unexpected experiences, people, or opportunities which God might send my way. Until I've fully recovered from this, I won't touch a drop of alcohol. Having it become the master of me is just not on. As always, I'll face my rough patches with a sober head. I doubt that having my usual maximum of one drink in an ordinary day would actually do any real damage. However, it isn't something I'm willing to chance. Fortunately, I'm very well stocked with podcasts, a couple of books, and whatever digital cable TV might have to offer over the next while. As long as I don't sink to that utterly torturous point where I can't focus my mind on anything, I ought to be able to get through this. If I'm very lucky, I might come away with ideas which rid me of the writer's block which has once again gotten me in its clutches. One can only hope and pray. I'm hopeful that I might be able to write down a concise version of my story for a person on a listserve I belong to where everyone is on ODSP. A collection of a thousand such stories is being collected in order to be sent to parliament in hopes that they might make a difference. That list is a kind of perverse comfort as most people who are on it have far bigger issues to deal with than I do. A lot of them have gotten into deep financial trouble, have obvious mental illness, and have become estranged from their families. There's a whole lot of utter misery out there which I know I've fortunately managed to avoid. My circumstances certainly constrain me and prevent me from engaging more fully with life. It's extremely frustrating but at least I know that my basic needs are covered. Some of these people might actually go off the rails and truly flip out. In fact, reading some of the stories which have been posted, a number of them actually have done so. I hope that my somewhat less dire story does somebody some good.
Rather than saving the various new rpg books I purchased in anticipation of a long, dull and lonely winter, I fear I'll have to start in on them earlier once this bout with insomnia is behind me. There's some hope that Atlantice Found and Subterainian, the two fictional books which seem interesting enough to help me through the next few days, may offer enough ideas which I can adapt for Enchantment's Twilight so I won't have to dig into books like the GURPS basic manual and other such sources until winter time.
Not a lot has happened over the past while. Dad's off golfing for the week and hopefully enjoying his yearly trip. Mom certainly has plenty to keep her occupied babysitting the grandkids, visiting friends, and doing her painting. I can only hope I'm that lucky when I'm her age. At times like this, it's all to easy to imagine the next thirty years going by without anything getting better for me. Short of resourting to the utterly absurd or downright criminal, there just doesn't seem to be any way to change life. I'm really not cut out for either the absurd or the criminal. You'd think I'd have sufficient cause for that kind of anger or disenchantment with society at large. However, there's that small issue of empathy. I want to be remembered for the good things I've managed to do, for being a good friend, and hopefully, for being there when I'm needed. That's just how i was made. I just have to keep ready, keep knocking on doors and wait for things to finally change. I know they will eventually. Over the shorter term, there's more social occasions at church and our upcoming trip to Winnipeg. That'll make for a nice change of pace. Also, after I'm back from that trip, I'm going to check out Mississauga Community Living as well as the local police to see if there might be any way I could be of use to those organisations. My brother thought that it might be a good idea for me to get in touch with the police since they'd certainly have the vehicles to get me to wherever they might be able to make use of me. I hadn't thought of that idea before. It's certainly worth pursuing once we're back. Having such things in the future helps a lot. I know I won't sink too far down. It's still damned annoying to have days like this where I feel this lethargic.
I caught the first episode of Flash Forward last week. It's good enough to give the next couple episodes a try. Robert J. Sawyer seems very happy with how it turned out. While I'm certainly happy for him, it just didn't hook me in all that profoundly. The book was ever so much better. I spent most of a day and a part of another rereading the book. I also listened to Crazy Dog Audio Theatre's The Stuff of Myth. It's a kind of musical commedy which I found mildly amusing. I've picked up a few new audio dramas from ZBS Audio in order to help pass some time. That raises the whole problem of my fear of becoming too much of a consumer. I'm spending money on things in order to pass time that I'd much rather spend in the company of others. There's just nothing else to do though. It's either that or sit there bored out of my skull with nothing at all new to occupy me in solitude. Podcasts, games, online discussions, documentaries and the like are the square pegs I'm sticking into round holes. Helpful but never entirely satisfactory. I need some way to connect with the wider community around me rather than all these people I'm never going to meet. You have that sense of actually making a difference when you're in a relationship. You also find it if you're lucky enough to have a meaningful career. As a single man limited in his ability to get places, the only time I find that satisfaction is occasionally through friends or when I complete one of my projects and hear from the people who it has made a difference for. Enchantment's Twilight will certainly have a good impact when it's at last ready but its such a large undertaking that I need to find something else in the interim.
There's a hellish kind of gloom hanging over me. I know intelectually that things must eventually get better. Affordable housing will finally come through and I'll actually have a place of my own if nothing else. This dark tunnel will at last end or change radically in character. It just seems like such a damned long walk through a thick fog which cancels out one's efforts. I've literally done everything possible to change things and have gotten nowhere. It's truly in God's hands now. I'm as ready and able to serve as I can be.
Friday, June 26, 2009
this week's happenings
Hello everyone. It's approaching nine o'clock in the morning as I start writing this entry. I've been awake since around five thirty. Thankfully, my new Steelseries headset designed for gamers arrived yesterday. It looks like I've made another excellent move on the technology front. The headset works brilliantly with my soundcard. I'm hearing details through it that I've never noticed before. It took a lot of tweaking with Winamp's equalizer presets to get music sounding good but I've figured that out now. Movies have yet to be experimented with but I predict damned good listening without too much tweaking required on that front. When it comes to accessible games, I've had a few rounds of GMA Tank Commander and Superdeakout. My ability to move and act with precision while playing sound-based accessible games is definitely improved by this headset. I don't put enough time into gaming anymore to have any chance of making those top scoreboards many of them feature these days. However, if I had discovered these headphones five or six years ago, they might very well have given me enough of a technical edge to have achieved that. I'm likely going to be grappling with insomnia and these needless damnably early morning rises for life. Now, I can face that prospect a little more cheerfully. I can listen to things at a reasonable volume without waking either the dead or my parents. Also, as this morning has shown, I won't end up with that headphone fatigue you get after an hour or so of using less costly headsets by the time it's reasonable to go downstairs and grab some breakfast. A very worth-while investment indeed.
The other investment I made this week is one in which I have a lot less faith. You've doubtless heard of the dating site called eHarmony. I don't watch a whole lot of TV as a general rule but have heard countless advertisements from them. Frankly, I've spent too damned many lonely days and nights feeling like my potential for contributing to and experiencing more of life has gone untapped. It's like I'm a car whose engine is going at full speed but whose wheels float mere centimetres above the road spinning uselessly. Church certainly helps as do friends when they aren't otherwise busy. However, when you get right down to brass tacks, I don't think anything else can ever fill that void in my life other than a loving woman. I've never felt more at my best than when I was in a relationship. Given this, I would be less than human if curiosity plus the prospect of more solitary time stretching endlessly ahead didn't finally get the better of me. As with Lavalife and telephone dating, I just had to find out what was behind the door. You can read about my oh so frustrating and fruitless experience with Lavalife if you delve far enough back in the blog. It'll be in that large first entry which contains what can still be found in my initial blog at
www.blindspots.net
I signed up for a three-month subscription. Clearly, eHarmoney has some serious psychology behind it. The report it generated about me was pretty much spot on although the system may perceive me as a tad more athletic than I think I am. It certainly picked up on my creative nature. What it couldn't grasp was how much my disability has forced me to live a different life than I otherwise would. I don't think they expected unemployed blind folks to avail themselves of their services. Despite that, I've found the site pretty accessible overall with a few unfortunate exceptions. Uploading my pictures could certainly have been made easier. I had to use my jaws cursor to pull that off. There were also some parts of the initial questionnaire which I can't be completely certain were filled out correctly. They had to do with how important things like age, ethnicity, etc were to me when it comes to my ideal match. Beyond a certain point, none of these things are overly important. I wouldn't feel right hooking up with somebody my parents' age and would have reservations if she were much younger than twenty-five. Ethnicity doesn't factor into it at all as long as she can communicate reasonably well in English. Education-wise, I just need my partner to be able to appreciate and participate in deep conversation about things. I've met enough people to know that you don't need a degree to do that. Life has its own way of teaching us without classrooms. It's called the passage of time. As to income, what matters is how she approaches the fact that we would largely be living off of what she made. I'm used to living with very limited personal income available and certainly don't need her to be rolling in dough. As long as we have a roof over our heads, if she can face life cheerfully without a lot of spare cash, so can I. There are certainly things I'd love to experience with a loving woman at my side but they're secondary to actually sharing life with said woman. Given a small community of people who I could get to know, I could be quite happy. What's important is that there's respect, love and appreciation on both sides.
Another area which could definitely stand improvement there is their highly touted "guided communication". Basically, after going to all the trouble of finding likely matches for you, you're supposed to see if there are any sparks between you by exchanging short volleys of multiple choice questions at each other. I'm completely serious, folks. Had I sat down and actually tried to conjure an extravert's worst nightmare, I couldn't have beaten this in a million years. If anything screams: "You've reached the very bottom of the barrel in your quest for love on Earth!", this setup certainly lets you know how disconnected and desperate you truly are. Most of the people in the matches I've received so far seem to prefer this inhuman mechanistic method of introduction. For someone in my position who desperately wants to connect more with humanity in general and a loving woman in particular, it seems like a colossal step backwards to introduce yourself to prospective lovers in this way. The only place one can display any degree of his or her actual soul is in one's personal profile. Just like on Lavalife, I can see myself fiddling with mine until kingdom come given its sheer importance. If you flunk out there, you never even get the stimulation of multiple guess quizettes. Due to how the site is constructed, I can't even look at the possible answers to the questions I choose. I presume it's possible for sighted people to do this but my speech software doesn't read the information out other than the actual question. I presume I'll be able to actually read the answers to the questions I administer but won't even know that for certain until I'm found interesting enough by some woman out there to actually bother with answering them. One thing I'm a bit worried about is the potential for sending the same question more than once to a potential partner. Presumably, given the care they've taken to automate damned near everything, they've covered that possibility. I can't imagine a more thunderously insulting blunder to make than that. Nor, at the same time, do I think I should have to keep careful note on which questions I've sent to which matches. I'm searching for a shot at true love, not hoping to pass a bloody university exam. I've done a life's worth of those damned things already while getting my BA.
Thankfully, there is a facility for exchanging standard but anonymous emails with each other if both parties agree to this. I just hope I manage to start up such a dialogue with one or more of these ladies before the three months I've paid for expires. Even if, by some act of God, it were made financially worth-while for me to keep at it for a longer time, I just don't think I'd have the sanity to spare. As always, I'll give this my best shot and represent myself as honestly as their pre-scripted "guided" communication lets me presuming that I actually get sent any questions to answer. As crazy as it seems, I'll also keep initiating this process with people who I find of interest. I did find one lady who preferred "fast-track" communication, otherwise known as saying what you actually want to say via anonymous email. Dare I hope that there are any more who will even come within my per view? I'd love to be dead wrong about eHarmony. Right now, that's pretty much all the hope I have of getting anything other than frustration and perhaps mild amusement for a little over a hundred bucks. Isn't that pathetic? My only sense of hope comes from my having been completely wrong about other things before and having lived to enjoy that. I had been saving up my money in hopes of starting a new life with Janene. Now, I've spent most of that saved money either on places which offer the only faint hope I have of finding someone new to love, or on things to make the single life I see stretching ahead of me more bare able. I still have a good safety margin as I utterly refuse to go into debt. While I certainly don't regret the decisions I made on items, my investments in escaping single life are somewhat more suspect. With nothing else happening over the Summer, there's no better time than now to explore these avenues. It just seems so unlikely to work though. If there were a place I could get to where people came with the expectation of meeting new friends, I would far more cheerfully put my money in getting there. However, there just isn't a place like that. You bring your own crew to bars and restaurants these days.
On that front, I had another mobility lesson earlier this week. I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that the grand idea of attempting to master even three routes was simply biting off more than I could chew. We're just shy of July and I'm still a long way from feeling very confident that I could make it all the way to Symposia's and back on my own. The route has yet to form a truly cohesive chain in my mind. I've already zoned out a couple of times today so don't feel at all safe heading out there now. I need a really good night's sleep. Presuming I achieve one of those, I feel quite confident in starting to practice roughly the first half of the route on my own. I'm going to try to do that at least four or five times between now and my next lesson the Wednesday after next. I ought to have enough source material to put some sort of audio documentary about this Summer's mobility experience by the time September rolls around. By that point, I should have getting to Symposia's and back mastered. The trouble with the bus routes is the sheer amount of time it would take to learn them. I'd go through all that trouble and then have it all blown out the window when I finally get a subsidized apartment in Hamilton or, dare I hope, find someone special to move in with.
As comfortable as living here is for me, I hate being in this Limbo in life. There's just no affordable alternative. When I ultimately get into a place I can afford, there's the question of whether it would then be considered at all responsible of me to leave it in order to be with someone I loved. Given that I've waited my entire adult life to have the opportunity to live in my own apartment, could I ever trust someone enough to let it go again? Especially after how much all of us, my friends, and my family, trusted her to actually marry me. That still hurts a lot. It's going to be a much slower process building that kind of trust presuming I'm ever given the chance to try with another woman. I can just hear a chorus of voices saying: "well then why not go for quantity and the short-term fling rather than this seemingly unattainable permanent marriage?" Because, readers, I just can't be at all comfortable with that. I'm not built that way. Just like I can't see my way to intentionally getting drunk, high on drugs, or wracking up a mountain of debt for instant gratification. That kind of human intimacy simply demands a deep love and level of commitment to be fully enjoyed. Shortcuts only diminish the experience.
Thank God for good friends. Mark and Wendy have rescued me from yet another empty Saturday. We're going to have dinner tomorrow evening. Thanks to my camping trip as well as the trip to Chicago, I'll have quite a lot to tell them about. Those two have really stuck by me over the years. It certainly takes the edge off the glumness of lethargy. It's just getting on five o'clock now. I zoned out at my desk for a chunk of afternoon but didn't type anything in my sleep. That phrase I entered among all the garbage I typed during one night's doze at my desk still sticks in my mind: "They're here because" I've never been able to pull the foggiest notion what I meant by that. Hundreds upon hundreds of random characters with that odd phrase stuck smack in the middle. I got a brief second wind and made another stab at the shorter article I'm writing for the church about my conference experience in Chicago. I'm inching closer to something good but it doesn't yet snap crackle pop like it deserves to. Damned earlier this morning, I did manage to help around ten people with their computer questions. Neither of my two short story ideas aren't going well at all. They seemed so promising when they first occurred to me and they're all I have at the moment. Guess I'll take this weekend off and try again on Monday. I'll feel a heaping bunch better once I've finished *something* and my money's on the church article. That conference was a terrific experience. If I can write something which conveys enough of that to motivate someone else to go on one of these things, I'll have done another bit of good and scored an important victory for my own peace of mind.
The other investment I made this week is one in which I have a lot less faith. You've doubtless heard of the dating site called eHarmony. I don't watch a whole lot of TV as a general rule but have heard countless advertisements from them. Frankly, I've spent too damned many lonely days and nights feeling like my potential for contributing to and experiencing more of life has gone untapped. It's like I'm a car whose engine is going at full speed but whose wheels float mere centimetres above the road spinning uselessly. Church certainly helps as do friends when they aren't otherwise busy. However, when you get right down to brass tacks, I don't think anything else can ever fill that void in my life other than a loving woman. I've never felt more at my best than when I was in a relationship. Given this, I would be less than human if curiosity plus the prospect of more solitary time stretching endlessly ahead didn't finally get the better of me. As with Lavalife and telephone dating, I just had to find out what was behind the door. You can read about my oh so frustrating and fruitless experience with Lavalife if you delve far enough back in the blog. It'll be in that large first entry which contains what can still be found in my initial blog at
www.blindspots.net
I signed up for a three-month subscription. Clearly, eHarmoney has some serious psychology behind it. The report it generated about me was pretty much spot on although the system may perceive me as a tad more athletic than I think I am. It certainly picked up on my creative nature. What it couldn't grasp was how much my disability has forced me to live a different life than I otherwise would. I don't think they expected unemployed blind folks to avail themselves of their services. Despite that, I've found the site pretty accessible overall with a few unfortunate exceptions. Uploading my pictures could certainly have been made easier. I had to use my jaws cursor to pull that off. There were also some parts of the initial questionnaire which I can't be completely certain were filled out correctly. They had to do with how important things like age, ethnicity, etc were to me when it comes to my ideal match. Beyond a certain point, none of these things are overly important. I wouldn't feel right hooking up with somebody my parents' age and would have reservations if she were much younger than twenty-five. Ethnicity doesn't factor into it at all as long as she can communicate reasonably well in English. Education-wise, I just need my partner to be able to appreciate and participate in deep conversation about things. I've met enough people to know that you don't need a degree to do that. Life has its own way of teaching us without classrooms. It's called the passage of time. As to income, what matters is how she approaches the fact that we would largely be living off of what she made. I'm used to living with very limited personal income available and certainly don't need her to be rolling in dough. As long as we have a roof over our heads, if she can face life cheerfully without a lot of spare cash, so can I. There are certainly things I'd love to experience with a loving woman at my side but they're secondary to actually sharing life with said woman. Given a small community of people who I could get to know, I could be quite happy. What's important is that there's respect, love and appreciation on both sides.
Another area which could definitely stand improvement there is their highly touted "guided communication". Basically, after going to all the trouble of finding likely matches for you, you're supposed to see if there are any sparks between you by exchanging short volleys of multiple choice questions at each other. I'm completely serious, folks. Had I sat down and actually tried to conjure an extravert's worst nightmare, I couldn't have beaten this in a million years. If anything screams: "You've reached the very bottom of the barrel in your quest for love on Earth!", this setup certainly lets you know how disconnected and desperate you truly are. Most of the people in the matches I've received so far seem to prefer this inhuman mechanistic method of introduction. For someone in my position who desperately wants to connect more with humanity in general and a loving woman in particular, it seems like a colossal step backwards to introduce yourself to prospective lovers in this way. The only place one can display any degree of his or her actual soul is in one's personal profile. Just like on Lavalife, I can see myself fiddling with mine until kingdom come given its sheer importance. If you flunk out there, you never even get the stimulation of multiple guess quizettes. Due to how the site is constructed, I can't even look at the possible answers to the questions I choose. I presume it's possible for sighted people to do this but my speech software doesn't read the information out other than the actual question. I presume I'll be able to actually read the answers to the questions I administer but won't even know that for certain until I'm found interesting enough by some woman out there to actually bother with answering them. One thing I'm a bit worried about is the potential for sending the same question more than once to a potential partner. Presumably, given the care they've taken to automate damned near everything, they've covered that possibility. I can't imagine a more thunderously insulting blunder to make than that. Nor, at the same time, do I think I should have to keep careful note on which questions I've sent to which matches. I'm searching for a shot at true love, not hoping to pass a bloody university exam. I've done a life's worth of those damned things already while getting my BA.
Thankfully, there is a facility for exchanging standard but anonymous emails with each other if both parties agree to this. I just hope I manage to start up such a dialogue with one or more of these ladies before the three months I've paid for expires. Even if, by some act of God, it were made financially worth-while for me to keep at it for a longer time, I just don't think I'd have the sanity to spare. As always, I'll give this my best shot and represent myself as honestly as their pre-scripted "guided" communication lets me presuming that I actually get sent any questions to answer. As crazy as it seems, I'll also keep initiating this process with people who I find of interest. I did find one lady who preferred "fast-track" communication, otherwise known as saying what you actually want to say via anonymous email. Dare I hope that there are any more who will even come within my per view? I'd love to be dead wrong about eHarmony. Right now, that's pretty much all the hope I have of getting anything other than frustration and perhaps mild amusement for a little over a hundred bucks. Isn't that pathetic? My only sense of hope comes from my having been completely wrong about other things before and having lived to enjoy that. I had been saving up my money in hopes of starting a new life with Janene. Now, I've spent most of that saved money either on places which offer the only faint hope I have of finding someone new to love, or on things to make the single life I see stretching ahead of me more bare able. I still have a good safety margin as I utterly refuse to go into debt. While I certainly don't regret the decisions I made on items, my investments in escaping single life are somewhat more suspect. With nothing else happening over the Summer, there's no better time than now to explore these avenues. It just seems so unlikely to work though. If there were a place I could get to where people came with the expectation of meeting new friends, I would far more cheerfully put my money in getting there. However, there just isn't a place like that. You bring your own crew to bars and restaurants these days.
On that front, I had another mobility lesson earlier this week. I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that the grand idea of attempting to master even three routes was simply biting off more than I could chew. We're just shy of July and I'm still a long way from feeling very confident that I could make it all the way to Symposia's and back on my own. The route has yet to form a truly cohesive chain in my mind. I've already zoned out a couple of times today so don't feel at all safe heading out there now. I need a really good night's sleep. Presuming I achieve one of those, I feel quite confident in starting to practice roughly the first half of the route on my own. I'm going to try to do that at least four or five times between now and my next lesson the Wednesday after next. I ought to have enough source material to put some sort of audio documentary about this Summer's mobility experience by the time September rolls around. By that point, I should have getting to Symposia's and back mastered. The trouble with the bus routes is the sheer amount of time it would take to learn them. I'd go through all that trouble and then have it all blown out the window when I finally get a subsidized apartment in Hamilton or, dare I hope, find someone special to move in with.
As comfortable as living here is for me, I hate being in this Limbo in life. There's just no affordable alternative. When I ultimately get into a place I can afford, there's the question of whether it would then be considered at all responsible of me to leave it in order to be with someone I loved. Given that I've waited my entire adult life to have the opportunity to live in my own apartment, could I ever trust someone enough to let it go again? Especially after how much all of us, my friends, and my family, trusted her to actually marry me. That still hurts a lot. It's going to be a much slower process building that kind of trust presuming I'm ever given the chance to try with another woman. I can just hear a chorus of voices saying: "well then why not go for quantity and the short-term fling rather than this seemingly unattainable permanent marriage?" Because, readers, I just can't be at all comfortable with that. I'm not built that way. Just like I can't see my way to intentionally getting drunk, high on drugs, or wracking up a mountain of debt for instant gratification. That kind of human intimacy simply demands a deep love and level of commitment to be fully enjoyed. Shortcuts only diminish the experience.
Thank God for good friends. Mark and Wendy have rescued me from yet another empty Saturday. We're going to have dinner tomorrow evening. Thanks to my camping trip as well as the trip to Chicago, I'll have quite a lot to tell them about. Those two have really stuck by me over the years. It certainly takes the edge off the glumness of lethargy. It's just getting on five o'clock now. I zoned out at my desk for a chunk of afternoon but didn't type anything in my sleep. That phrase I entered among all the garbage I typed during one night's doze at my desk still sticks in my mind: "They're here because" I've never been able to pull the foggiest notion what I meant by that. Hundreds upon hundreds of random characters with that odd phrase stuck smack in the middle. I got a brief second wind and made another stab at the shorter article I'm writing for the church about my conference experience in Chicago. I'm inching closer to something good but it doesn't yet snap crackle pop like it deserves to. Damned earlier this morning, I did manage to help around ten people with their computer questions. Neither of my two short story ideas aren't going well at all. They seemed so promising when they first occurred to me and they're all I have at the moment. Guess I'll take this weekend off and try again on Monday. I'll feel a heaping bunch better once I've finished *something* and my money's on the church article. That conference was a terrific experience. If I can write something which conveys enough of that to motivate someone else to go on one of these things, I'll have done another bit of good and scored an important victory for my own peace of mind.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
slow draggy day
Hello everyone. It's a slow rainy Thursday afternoon. I just can't seem to shake my writer's block at all. I must have written a hundred faulse starts this week. Nothing is worth keeping at all. There isn't much doing on the forums of Plentyoffish or on Twitter today. Yes, folks. I've finally decided to join the Twitter band-wagon. I'm having a hard time ajusting to the short limits placed upon one's tweets. No big surprise seeing as I tend to write notes during lectures in full sentences. There's definitely a place for Twitter. Things which aren't worth a blog posting are nonetheless still worth expressing as I experience them. For example, I heard an excellent essay called Wall on BBC Radio 4 about the situation between Israel and the Palestinians. It was quite thought-provoking if somewhat grim. That's the kind of thing you can just jot off briefly into Twitter. Figured I'd be obtuse and put that one in my blog though just for kicks. Should you want to be in receipt of my tweets, my url is:
www.twitter.com/mfeir
I found another site for facilitating dating and community building among disabled people. Looks like they have forums and other accessible facilities on offer. Perhaps, I might find new friends and/or someone special there. Worth a shot. I figure if I can contribute meaningfully to ongoing conversations while I'm awaiting my muse, I'm still doing some good at least.
The next few weekends ought to do a lot to lift this stale feeling from life. I expect to get my passport this coming week. Yesterday, I got an email saying that I was officially registered at this conference in Chicago. Apparently, it can get quite hot down there. I wouldn't have figured on that seeing as I've often read of it as "the windy city". The church has found someone to guide me while I'm down there. Presuming there are no last-minute snags, I'm definitely in for quite a different experience.
I've gotten a bit bored with Wikinomics. When it becomes available, I definitely want to grab his book Growing Up Digital. That ought to be more up my alley. Wikinomics definitely has some nuggets of interest within it. However, it's ultimately a business book. Still well-written and useful but just not the angle I'm after. On the bright side, I've found another free book discussing what makes a game good. It's called Well Played and I learned of it on:
www.gamesetwatch.com
Dan, Allison and the two little ones are coming over tomorrow for a visit. That'll certainly add much-needed spice to life. It's been a little while since I've seen them. Catching up with them is always fun. Well, that pretty much covers things today. I'm off to watch Star Trek TNG on Spacecast presuming it's an episode I'm not bored with. With TNG, the chances are quite good that it'll be one I still find enjoyable. It was such a well-crafted show for the most part.
www.twitter.com/mfeir
I found another site for facilitating dating and community building among disabled people. Looks like they have forums and other
The next few weekends ought to do a lot to lift this stale feeling from life. I expect to get my passport this coming week. Yesterday, I got an email saying that I was officially registered at this conference in Chicago. Apparently, it can get quite hot down there. I wouldn't have figured on that seeing as I've often read of it as "the windy city". The church has found someone to guide me while I'm down there. Presuming there are no last-minute snags, I'm definitely in for quite a different experience.
I've gotten a bit bored with Wikinomics. When it becomes available, I definitely want to grab his book Growing Up Digital. That ought to be more up my alley. Wikinomics definitely has some nuggets of interest within it. However, it's ultimately a business book. Still well-written and useful but just not the angle I'm after. On the bright side, I've found another free book discussing what makes a game good. It's called Well Played and I learned of it on:
www.gamesetwatch.com
Dan, Allison and the two little ones are coming over tomorrow for a visit. That'll certainly add much-needed spice to life. It's been a little while since I've seen them. Catching up with them is always fun. Well, that pretty much covers things today. I'm off to watch Star Trek TNG on Spacecast presuming it's an episode I'm not bored with. With TNG, the chances are quite good that it'll be one I still find enjoyable. It was such a well-crafted show for the most part.
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