Another LJ writer’s block question:

If you were 12 and could see yourself now, do you think you’d be happy or disappointed, and why?

I think to answer that question, I need to look at where I was when I was twelve.

I turned twelve in the second semester of sixth grade, which puts me pretty much in the period when life was nothing but Dungeons and Dragons and computers.  This was before D&D was cool and nerds were the new jocks, and while I wasn’t severely beaten for being a geek, there was a fair amount of psychological warfare involved.  Actually, that was pretty much the turning point; in 6th grade, I was still in grade school, which was largely flat from a social standpoint.  We were still kids, nobody had discovered the opposite sex, and while there may have been some cliques and friendships and class structure, it wasn’t that pronounced.

The second half of twelve though, was junior high.  This is where all of the elementary schools were dumped into the big pond, plus puberty had kicked in.  Not only that, but it became important who you knew, what you wore, what your parents drove, and how you looked.  And I didn’t get the memo, and kept buried in the Dungeon Master’s Guide with a handful of D20s in my pocket, some Asimov in my backpack, and the ability to type SYS 49152 faster than anyone around.  I didn’t think that this was the time to “brand” myself, and I feel like I spent the next decade trying to reverse the person I instantly became on that August in 1983.

Another big game-changer when I was twelve was that I went on this long Christmas holiday trip to Florida, first to Tampa to go to Busch Gardens, and then to Orlando to go to Disney World.  My family never did these kinds of things; other kids at school always went to Florida, or on these ski trips.  I don’t know if it was economical reasons or that my parents back then were not nomadic in any way, but if we went anywhere, it was the quick trip to Chicago to my grandparents’ place.  At that point, I think I’d been to maybe six states, but other than those I saw as an infant, I’d never left the Indiana-Michigan-Illinois region, except for a couple of trips to Wisconsin, and a couple to St. Louis.  So this trip became a huge life experience at the time, even if it was just to ride the Haunted Mansion ride with 2.7 million other people like dopey tourists.

What the trip to Florida showed me was that there’s a lot outside of Indiana.  And maybe before that, I thought of going to college and getting a job and leaving.  But I never thought much outside of Indiana, because I never saw anything outside it.  It’s like that developmental step in childhood where you learn to stand; prior to that, you spend all of your time laying on your back in a crib, looking up at these giant monsters that feed and change you.  And when you learn to pull yourself up on the side of a couch and plant both feet on the ground and totter around upright, your entire worldview massively changes.  I mean, it literally changes by ninety degrees, but this mental switch is thrown where you realize that these giant feeding and diapering monsters are the same thing as you.  And I think this trip is what made me start to think that someday I could leave, and my world was bigger than the 40,000-person city where I grew up.

And the computer geek in me thought California was some uptopian paradise.  Every other movie back in the early 80s was about California, and this new thing called MTV showed a constant barrage of music from the region.  And I think a part of the twelve year old me would be surprised and pleased that I ended up here.  And while I’m not designing the next Commodore 64, I am working in the heart of Silicon Valley, and I’m making more money than I ever could have imagined.    (To be fair, I think when I was twelve, my total net worth was maybe a third of what I have in my wallet right now.)  In that sense, I think I would be happy.

And maybe there’s part of me that would be disappointed.  I mean, when I was twelve, I was being groomed to be the next Albert Einstein or something; my parents were pushing me into these gifted and talented programs; I was already reading at a high school senior level; and I was already outscoring a lot of college-bound kids on the SATs.  I think the twelve-year-old me would think I would have several PhDs in physics or chemistry and would be inventing some anti-gravity serum or cancer cure.  So yeah, I didn’t do that.  But I think the twelve-year-old me would also expect us all to have jet packs and time machines and an EZ Pass to drive your car into Low Earth Orbit on your daily commute to the moon.  That said, I think the 1983 me would be sufficiently mind-blown by five minutes at my 2007-era Macbook.

I think the big thing though is I would be happy that I finally figured out to some functional level how the social things worked.  I mean, I am not a social diva, and it’s still something I struggle with greatly.  But I am married, and I had more than a couple of dating experiences, and while I did not master things, I could say I figured them out.  And in 1983, at least toward the end of my first year in junior high, that stuff completely paralyzed me.  Like I said, the puberty thing set in, and I started having obsessive crushes on girls who would never talk to me, and I started my quick slide into depression, and I had no idea what the hell to do.  I had that deer-in-headlights thing for years, and slid backward into my own little world.  And I think to look 27 years in the future and see what I have now, I would be pretty amazed.

I feel a need to make a side-reference to the movie Hot Tub Time Machine, which I saw last night, and which roughly touched on some of this concept, but in a completely tasteless and so-awful-I-liked-it way.  I never thought we’d get to the point where looking back into the 80s would be a whole genre of art, not that HTTM is exactly art.  I still dug it, although Sarah was somewhat horrified.  I’m not saying it fired on all cylinders or it worked perfectly, or even as good as something like The Hangover, but I still dug it.

Okay, off to get some allergy meds going…

I have allergies.  I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have them, starting with a trip to the hospital when I was maybe four, when I had an allergic reaction to penicillin like most people have a reaction to agent orange.  It was a defining force of my childhood: weekly trips for allergy shots; the torture of testing, where they draw a giant battleship grid on your back and scratch you with a needle a thousand times; driving in circles in the family car with the AC running to filter out the first ragweed epidemic of the year, a washcloth over my eyes, which resembled Rocky’s after nine rounds of pummeling with an eight-foot tall Russian.  My parents thought I was allergic to chocolate, so I had all of my Easter candy confiscated and rifled over, leaving only the crappy jelly beans and no chocolate bunny.  Every day in Kindergarten, they would bring in a giant crate of half-pint cartons of chocolate milk, and I got to walk back to the cafeteria to exchange mine for plain old white milk.  And it turns out I wasn’t allergic to chocolate.  Just advil, aspirin, penecillin, ragweed, pollen, fresh-cut grass, tumbleweed, horsehair, and 96 other things bothered me.

And then, I hit my teens, and I exchanged most of my allergies for social awkwardness and crippling depression.  It wasn’t the best tradeoff, but I could mow lawns and leave the house in April.  I also erroneously thought I was allergic to Tylenol, but during the great dental rebuild of 1996, I risked it, and found I was AOK with the aceto-stuff, and started a long habit of Tylenol PM to knock me out at night.  I’m sure my liver will thank me later.

But here’s the deal: I think they’re back.  Maybe since New York, I’d have one or two bad allergy days in April, enough where I’d need a Claritin.  (I used to get them from Canada, but now they’re OTC.)  But here in the Bay area, the allergies have been pummeling me, giving me blurry eyes and headaches and that first-day-of-cold raspiness and itchiness in the back of the throat.  So I’ve been playing with the OTC drugs.  Zyrtec-D isn’t bad, although its blister pack is impossible to open without a team of engineers and a chainsaw.  Benadryl knocks me out; claritin doesn’t do much anymore.  I need something more, but I fear the chemical lobotomy the hard stuff brings.

I tried some flonase this week, and it gave me crippling headaches, to the verge of vomiting.  I don’t know if it affected my smell, since I can’t smell anyway because of allergies.  Anyway, I made an appointment with an allergist.  Maybe I will get a new script; maybe it involves a bunch of shots and whatnot.  Actually I am sure it will involve a ton of appointments and tests and copays and waiting rooms, and I will be handed from specialist to specialist who don’t want a liability issue and can’t fix anything.  You know, the usual.

I think I told the story before, but when I was in the hospital as a kid, I shared a room with an Amish kid who got his arm cut off in some kind of plow accident.  Maybe he was Mennonite; all I know is it was my first experience with strange dudes with beards and no mustaches and 19th century clothes, and my first experience with a kid with no arm.  He only stayed a day, but I remember it freaking the hell out of me.  I wonder what happened to that kid, if he’s knocking around Goshen in a buggy with twelve kids, or if he dropped out, joined the English, became a heroin junkie, and works at a Wal-Mart somewhere, or collects disability, lives in a trailer, shoots speed, and listens to Judas Priest, occasionally wondering what happened to that kid 35 years ago who was puffed up like a balloon, upset because he couldn’t watch the TV because his roommate’s parents thought TV was of the devil.

I’m last in my fantasy baseball league, BTW.  And 5 of my pitchers had wins this week.  It takes a special kind of bad to pull that one off.

Opening Frickin’ Day, 2010.  Today’s the day my iPhone battery life is slashed to a third, because I pull it out ten times an hour to check scores.  It’s when I start leaving work at 6:05 so I can listen to the first three innings of a game in Colorado.  It’s when I start cursing the Montfort brothers for not opening their god damned wallets.  And this year will be even worse, given the fact that I just signed up for my buddy Joe’s fantasy league.  I did this in 08, and it turns out I signed up in 09, but then got in a car accident, so when I didn’t make the draft, Joe put my slot on autopilot.  It turns out my rudderless ship placed 5th out of 10.  So if I can’t do better than that this year, I’ve got bigger problems.

Now I compare every baseball season to the 2007 season, which is when I really fell in love with baseball and started considering myself a fan.  I, of course, greatly miss not being in Colorado right now, not living a block from Coors Field and being able to walk over on a lazy Sunday and pick up a seat in the 330s for twenty bucks, the section where I can look right down at home plate, look straight across at the scoreboard, or look slightly up and see, on a clear day, the majestic Rocky Mountains in the distance.  Coors Field may not have its Green Monster or garlic fries, and it may have other shortcomings (like the low-hanger urinals, which I hate) but the view is one of the best in baseball.

So, roll call - who’s still here, and who’s just a ghost of 07?   Garrett Atkins got non-tendered. In non-baseball terms, this is when your contract expires, and the management decides to say “thanks but no” on getting another deal. This is no surprise for Atkins - he lost his full time spot at third base last year to Ian Stewart, who essentially did a better job at roughly five and a half million dollars a year less salary. But he was a key face in the Rockies’ run to the World Series in 07, and part of me feels sad any time a piece of that team moves on from Denver.  In his case, he’s going to the Orioles, which is the baseball equivalent of being transferred from the head office to the Czech republic.

The biggest blow to that memory was Matt Holiday moving on this year to Oakland (and ultimately St. Louis.) He was one of those big “face of the franchise” players, an all star and home run derby king, and always a welcome face in left field. The Rox never get air time on Sportscenter, but when they did, it was almost always a Holliday play.  I cursed and cursed the Montforts for not giving him a better deal and pushing him away, and my offseason Sabermetric exercise I never got to was calculating how the Rockies would have done statistically with him in left field.  But Carlos Gonzalez stepped up, and Holliday dropped that catch that basically shut down the Cards, so it all works out in the end.

Yorvit Torrealba is gone, which I have mixed feelings about.  I actually named my car Yorvit, because when I first bought the Yaris in the fall of 07, I kept forgetting the name Yaris.  Anyway, he’s gone on to the Padres, which trumps going to the Orioles tenfold in the “step-down” department.

Probably the biggest name I will miss in ‘10 is not a player, but announcer Jeff Kingery. He’s called Rockies games since day one on 850 KOA and the rest of the Rockies network. when I started this whole affair back in 07, I went to as many games as I could, given that I worked from home and lived only a block from Coors Field. but on the days I could not attend, I’d tune in to KOA and listen to the games as I hacked away on Ruby on Rails code. Listening to a ball game in the radio has this hypnotic allure to me, something I can do as I work on something else and pull in the dribble of numbers and stats from the AM radio ether. we didn’t have cable back then, and I’d only catch games on the tube if we were at a bar or restaurant where the game was on a flat screen in the corner. but I prefer listening to the games. Now I will watch every Rockies game that’s on TV, but now that we’re out of market and I’m too cheap of a bastard to shell out for whatever premium package you need to see every Rockies game.  Knowing Comcast, I probably have to buy some $70 a week plan that includes professional curling, Lacrosse, and the Kobe Bryant channel, and won’t let me just get MLB TV.  At any rate, I get the At Bat coverage on the iPhone, and can listen to 850’s feed in the car on the way home, which is always weird to me.

Predictions?  Rockies will take the NL west if they can keep together their pitching, which is the big question right now.  If the Dodgers are able to take the division, I have a good feeling the Rockies will get the wild card.  I think the Giants have absolutely everything in place to do stellar this year, but every year that happens, they are beaten, bloody, and fucked by the end of May with their entire offense on the 365-day DL.  I think the Cardinals will take the Central, and there’s no way the Phillies won’t take the east.  And there’s probably no way the Phillies won’t take the NL.  Also in the East, I think the Nationals will enjoy their first season not in the cellar, thanks to the trainwreck of injuries known as the Mets.

AL?  Sort the teams by payroll, take the top four, then the top two, then the top one, and that’s who will win the World Series.  Why again am I not a fan of the AL?

Okay, time to start combing over the numbers to get ready for our draft in 10 hours…

I think if I had one chance to make one single change to my entire life from birth to now, I would find a way to back up every single sent and received email and bitnet conversation I had from the second I got an email account in the fall of 1989 to present.  I would also figure out some way to index and search this crap efficiently, but I can figure that out later.  I have bits and pieces of email from college, some near-complete archives, some important, but there’s ones I wish I could read now.

The biggest problem was that our accounts in school had quotas.  VMS accounts had a 2000-block quota, which if I remember correctly is 2000 * 512 bytes, or about a meg.  (Don’t start with the megabyte versus mebibyte shit - this isn’t wikipedia.)  Anyway, that meant that on a weekly basis, I was making a judgment call over what to keep and not to keep, not knowing in 20 years that the email I got from some random person in a flamewar would be important, because said person would become the third-largest selling children’s author and have a movie done by Disney, or they would become a terrorist, or whatever.  And those judgment calls were usually made when I went over quota.  And I was probably drunk, too.

The bitnet thing also bothers me.  I used to spend all day at work having these running conversations with various bitnet buddies, usually other people who also worked campus jobs answering phones or driving a desk.  Bitnet was sort of like IM but ten years earlier, a way to trade lines of chat with another person, but without the fancy AOL-inspired UI and smileys.  And here’s the problem.  Okay, I was friends with this girl in 94, 95.  In my head, I was more than friends with her; she looked like a 20-year-old Sean Young and didn’t know she was drop-dead gorgeous.  And she was funny, and a lot of fun to talk to, and we spent like six, eight hours a day talking about nothing while I sat in the basement of the Support Center, telling people that there really wasn’t an ‘any’ key on their computer.  And we hung out a few times, but nothing serious.  There were complications, like she was a devout Christian, maybe a Pentecostal or something.  And she went to church like five times a week.  And she lived with her parents.  But the biggest complication was that I was too chickenshit to do anything about it.  That’s pretty much the story of my last couple of years at IU, and maybe I want to write that story someday, like part of this stupid book about Bloomington I have been plonking away at for years and have recently been pushing around, but I think I need to stop writing about Bloomington and write a book about a bunch of guys filling out their brackets for an office pool for NCAA basketball, except the office is the laboratory where they engineered the AIDS virus and it’s run by Josef Mengele.  But I’m sure Jerry Stahl wrote that story as filler for Juggs magazine back in the 80s.  But I digress.

My point is, I have a lot of the emails I have from her.  But I have none of the bitnets, since you can’t log those.  And all of the emails were “hey, are you online?  bitnet me.”  So much for writing that story.

Also, for any (both) of you who read Air in the Paragraph Line #13, I have this story called “Burial Ground” that is kinda-sorta based on a relationship and breakup I had in 1993.  So this is a girl who I swapped a lot of emails with, a lot of pouring-out of the heart into the stupid EVE editor in VMS that I used to write my emails back in 1993.  And I had all of them in an archive, and I never went back and read them, because it was too painful.  I sort of told myself that after some set amount of time, or maybe when I got into another relationship and put it all behind me, I’d go back and read all of our emails.  And I gzipped them up.  And then I got like one email from her in 1994.  And when I was cleaning up my account because I had no god damned disk space because of that quota, I zipped up the unzipped email.  And it wrote right over the existing zip file without asking and deleted all of it.  And I didn’t notice it at the time - only like a year later, long after any tape backup would have gone away.

And I dated someone in 2000 that went to Cornell, and in the beginning of 2001, I bought a laptop and tried to rsync all of my data from my home PC to my laptop.  But I did the command backwards, and synced a blank hard drive on top of my PC.  I had a backup from 1999, and luckily all of my writing was backed up to a remote account.  But man, I wish I had that mail from 2000.

I also wish I had the mail I sent to people.  Because back in school, I was famous for writing these giant, rambling emails to various prospects, who probably deleted them without reading them, but I would love to still have them.  Starting when I moved my accounts to Speakeasy in 1996, I started religiously logging my sent mail, and aside from that 2000 blackout, have pretty much every mail I’ve sent since then.  And I keep talking about some way to slice that up into something interesting, but who knows a) if I will ever figure out how to read and edit all of it and b) if any of it is actually interesting to anyone aside from me.

Here is the oldest email that I wrote that I could find that was marginally interesting.  It was written to a guy who spammed everyone who was logged into a CS machine at a certain point of the night, looking for Douglas Hofstadter.

From: Jon Konrath 
To: William Winton 
Subject: D.H.'s email address
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1992 00:34:51 -0500

William Winton writes:
 >
 > I am looking for Douglas Hofstadter's Email address.  He works at Indiana
 > University's Cognitive Science Department.  If you know of him, please
 > send me his E-mail address.
 >
 > Much appreciation (in advance),
 >
 >     William Winton
 >     Internet:  wwinto@sinkhole.unf.edu

Douglas Hofstadter doesn't exist, he is a bit of urban folklore here
at IU.  All of his work in the area of cognitive science was actually
written by an elisp program called spew-random-cogsci-jargon.el that
was developed for the emacs editor by Bill Perry.  The Cognitive
Science department is also a bit of a rumor, we are actually a vocational
school that specializes in truck driving and air conditioner technology.
sorry.

-Jon Konrath, A.S. program, interior floor covering technology program

My new TV showed up yesterday.  Samsung had an annual gift thing where they would give out your choice of various Samsung products, and since the year-end gift actually shows up in late March, there was some question whether or not I would get it.  Last year, I got an NC-10 netbook; this time around, the choices were slightly higher-end, given the great return to prosperity (or at least the fact that sales weren’t horribly in the red.)

This year’s best choice was a 40”  5-series LCD TV.  The only downside is that less than a year ago, I bought a 26” 2-series Samsung TV, so now I am stuck with a second TV and no place to put it.  I will probably dump it on Craigslist, although my general experience with selling on Craigslist is fairly negative.  The ratio of buyers to crazy people who want to swindle, spam, or question you about the obvious is not favorable.  It might be more rewarding to just throw this one out the window and put a video of it on youtube, or maybe take it to a gun range and fill it full of 9mm holes, instead of answering 400 “can I pay you 20% of your asking price and can you deliver it to me 70 miles away at 3AM on a Tuesday and then can I complain that you ripped me off because it doesn’t feature 3D mind control and/or I didn’t understand the concept that a 26” TV is actually 26 inches and not somehow 197 inches?”

And just to be proactive about the “oh I don’t watch TV; I only listen to NPR and debate the merits of 14th century agricultural unions with my local organic grocer co-op” comments I will probably get for confessing the terrible evil that I own a TV, I should preface that the TV is more of a video monitor than it is a TV.  I mean, I don’t spend 20 hours a day watching Fox News and The Bachelor re-runs on it; I think most of the time is spent streaming video from NetFlix or playing stuff off of the BluRay player formerly known as the PS3.   I do have cable now, and I have a DVR and cherry-pick a few things from it, but it’s odd how using a DVR disconnects you from the culture of watching TV.  It used to be on Friday mornings, everyone would talk about the shows that were on Thursday nights.  But now people watch those shows time-shifted to whenever, or catch up when the DVD round-up hits NetFlix a few months later, or just go to hulu or torrent the thing down.  It makes the viewing far more convenient, but removes the communal aspect of it.

That said, our DVR is a piece of shit.  Comcast, despite their blabbering about how Xfinity is the future of all communication, provides us with a total garbage Motorola box.  Their “HD” box has component out, the worst user interface that has ever come out of anywhere aside Redmond, and a remote that’s about as responsive as a PC Jr. rendering an entire James Cameron feature-length 3D movie.  The only fan of this box is our cats, who think that it’s their heated bed, and fight over who gets to lay on top of it and shed hair into its moving parts.  I know it’s only a matter of time before it shorts out and we have to schedule a service call with Comcast, who will say “we can be there between the months of June and August, so stay home from work then” and give us another circa-1997 box, probably a month before they declare that our neighborhood is Xfinity-ready or whatever they call it, and we require new boxes.

I do have to say it’s neat that when we get a call on our Comcast digital voice service, a caller ID box pops up on the TV.  Too bad we get the majority of our calls to our cell phones these days.

Anyway, the new TV is in place.  It fit well in the entertainment center, and does not block the traversal path to the feline heated bed.  It is weird though, because it’s the same TV UI, and a very similar remote, and the same startup/shutdown chime, and is otherwise just a super-sized version of the same TV I had.  So although it’s gigantic, and now it’s 1080p, it’s not a radically different set than what I had.

I haven’t fired up the PS3 with any games yet, so I should see how Modern Warfare 2 does on the big screen.

[2020 update: this TV died five years later.]