In a few thousand years, when the population of Earth looks back on our civilization as we look back on the ancient Egyptians, you can be certain that anything our society’s greatest minds have achieved will be stored electronically (or by another, more advanced means), ready for easy access by anyone inclined to look.  No one will ever be inclined to look.  Our greatest inventions and triumphs will be forgotten, which equally ensures that the most difficult tribulations of your life will have been long since scoured from the Earth.  You’ll all be forgotten and everything you’ve ever done will be for nothing.

The only worthwhile pursuit, in truth, is large-scale vandalism.  Extremely-large scale.  I’m not saying you should use nuclear explosives to write a message on the moon, but…well…I may know a guy who can hook you up.

Please don’t make the first ever moon-post “First!”

It’ll just start a flame war and your message will be drowned out by a swarm of “Cool story, bro” rebuttals.

Future events such as these could effect your lives…in the future.

I’mma go to bed now.

It turns out that the universe we perceive is just the three-dimensional cross-section of a four-dimensional snowglobe as it plummets “downward” in four-dimensional space.  Now, to answer your first question, I was drinking Captain Morgan ‘Tattoo’, which is like regular Captain Morgan, but it’s black-cherry flavored.  In general, it’s perfectly adequate.

Anyway, I think this theory pretty much explains the universe, so you probably shouldn’t bother trying to find flaws in it.  This means I win at all science and math forever, and I should get a dollar any time someone uses fractions or magnets.  I would like my Nobel Prize presented by Bruce Campbell and Summer Glau.  Summer should be wearing Tina Fey glasses when the award is presented.

Also, since my theory proves the existence of a god while simultaneously disproving all religions, it means I win at theology, too.  I don’t know what sort of aware theologists get for excellence in theologizing, but I want it presented by Tina Fey.

I also want a written apology from Al Gore.  He knows why.

Then, I heard that Penn had his own radio show, and every single episode was available for free online.  Since I’ve also gotten back into MMOs recently, I figured I could use something entertaining to listen to while I perform mindlessly repetitive actions.

I’m less than a dozen episodes in (each one is an hour), but I’m already having trouble listening on.  I knew in advance that Penn and Teller (Teller doesn’t appear on the radio show, by the way) were atheists, but the more I hear Penn describe it, the more agitating it gets.

To be honest, it’s not even Penn’s beliefs that get to me, it’s his high praise of Richard Dawkins.  Richard Dawkins is an evangelical atheist who believes that faith should not be tolerated.  He’s an atheist who preaches religious persecution and his choir at Wired magazine saw no problem with it when they interviewed him.

Although, looking at that article, it lists Penn and Teller as members of his church.  Since I’ve only listened to the first few episodes of the radio show, I’m still on early 2006, whereas the Wired article was written near the end of that same year.  I’m a little curious to hear Penn’s explanation and defense of Dawkins’ new religion: in the first two episodes of his radio show, Penn likens wearing a shirt that states “No God” to be equivalent to wearing a cross.  This seems very reasonable to me.  He even mentions meeting a Christian woman while wearing such a shirt, and how there was no tension between them; they were just two people expressing ideas.

That is how America should work.  Hell, that’s how the entire world should work.  Two people with wildly different– mutually exclusive, even– core philosophies being able to interact without conflict, despite both of them wearing their convictions as decoration.

Dawkins’ philosophy is that faith is a dangerous delusion which should be treated as a mental illness.  He believes that parents should not be allowed to teach their religious beliefs to their children.  How the hell could any rational person support this lunatic?

It’s reasonable for a government to outlaw teaching children to perform dangerous or illegal activities.  However, it’s ludicrous to expect constraints beyond that.   Most, if not all states require standardized tests within public schools to ensure that students are meeting a minimum standard of learning.  I’m not sure how private schools work, but I’m sure they need some form of state accreditation.  Even home-schooled students need to take tests to prove they’re being educated to a certain level.  If those standards are being met and the child isn’t being taught to set people on fire, what right does anyone have to interfere?

At best, Dawkins’ religion is one of pure arrogance; at worst, of bigotry.  The New Atheist church believes that there is no middle ground.  They view Agnostics as being weak-willed and implicit supporters of fundamentalists.  The New Atheists believe that if you’re not one of them, you’re against them.  As we all know, however, only Sith deal in absolutes.

To ensure these pages don’t escape their unholy prison of lolcats and gross-out porn, I make sure to drink heavily immediately after deciding not to hit the “Publish” button, thus destroying any brain cells used to store short-term memories.

I’ve found that mere alcohol doesn’t quite cut it (in fact, I haven’t had a drink in a few months).  To get the job done, I’ve had to start drinking pure Snark Juice.

Snark Juice is an all-natural extract of the rare Sarcastibitch Flower, which only blossoms in the presence of films that are simultaneously incredibly expensive, painfully bad, and inexplicably successful.  The largest blooms come from Michael Bay movies.  For the most potent Snark Juice, I had to employ a dangerous and foolhardy tactic: Transformers 2…

…without a Rifftrack.

I began to experience a splitting headache within the first five minutes of the movie, but my suffering increased exponentially any time Michael Bay decided his comic relief characters should have screen time.

By the end of the first act (of twenty), I was a broken man.  Shy LeBoofe just keeps jabbering like a jawa on crystal meth, and his roommate screams and the twin transformers are racist for no good goddamn reason and none of the comic relief is even remotely funny.  To put this in perspective:

I literally laugh out loud at Garfield comics.  While sober.

I can find no humor in this movie.  Not once do I so much as crack a smile.

This headache is killing me in a very literal sense: my nose started bleeding a few minutes into the second hour, but it’s not regular blood.  It’s black and brackish and it doesn’t flow as a liquid should.  The pain in my skull seems to be a living thing now.  It’s a vindictive idiot child that whispers taunts into my mind–

“Why is there a giant, empty field behind the Air and Space museum?”

“Why is it noon everywhere on the world at once?”

“Why did the Allspark splinter spontaneously start burning a hole through the floor, even though it rested on LeBeaouphfe’s clothing without a problem?

“Why can the Decepticons take flawless human form?”

“Why is the fact that Decepticons can take flawless human form not a cause for concern from ANYONE?”

“Why did Lebeeuuuoooofe’s roommate have a full computer lab (including a vending machine) set up in their dorm room despite the fact that he only arrived a couple of hours before Laboaf himself?”

“Why did the whole planet forget about the giant robots that razed a major city and caused countless deaths in the first movie (and seem to be doing likewise in this one)?”

“Why did Michael Bay see fit to show us John Tuturro’s ass?”

“Why is Michael Bay?”

The questions spin through my mind, chasing one another in a maddening game of indoor baseball.  First base is the antique lamp, second is the big-screen TV, third is the fancy china we never actually use unless guests are over.

Except that it’s not indoor baseball, and all the bases are in my mind.  They’re all fragile, sacred things: URLs of free porn sites, a catalog of Family Guy references, penis jokes, and a backup of the Porn URLs, just in case.

These things make up who I am, and Transformers 2 is obliterating all of them– one unintelligible action scene at a time.

And then, as quickly as it started, it was over.  I briefly thought to myself that’s what she said, but I had no time to reflect on my wit: the madness was still seeping into my mind. From there, it would travel into my heart, then into my brain and possibly my junk.  I had to stop it here.

I briefly entertained the idea of cutting off my own head and replacing it with a chainsaw, but decided to try something else, first.  The Sarcastibitch Flower…it was blooming larger than I’d ever seen it.  I didn’t have time to extract Snark Juice or even brew Sarcasm Tea.  No, time was running out.  I needed a more drastic solution: I’d have to snort a line of freebase Cynicism.

It was iffy– I’d never tried this before.  Sure, I was snarky and sarcastic , but was I truly pessimistic and jaded to the degree that I’d be able to withstand such a pure form of Cynicism?

Transformers grossed $402,111,870 worldwide…

…ugh, the pain…

…while Serenity has only made $25,514,517.

Fuck it.

I grabbed the entire plant and crammed it directly into my brain by way of my nostril.  Even if it couldn’t help me overcome my impending doom with Sarcastynism, the frontal lobotomy I was inflicting upon myself should do the trick.  To be double-certain, I used the stalk as a straw to snort some Haterade directly into my temporal lobe.  Luckily, I was far too stupid at this point to realize my brain was incapable of providing the suction necessary to pull a viscous fluid (Haterade has the consistency of syrup) through a plant stalk (the stalk of  the Sarcastibitch plant is very similar to a bamboo shoot, only more ironic).

Blessed ignorance washed over me, and I instantly forgot why I was typing this.  The point is that, even though it looks like I fell away from my “two hours a day” writing plan, I’ve still been hard at work.

Busy penning papers that won’t see the light of day.

The short comic centers around Adolf Hitler (of course!), who is in the midst of executing a an intruder that looks like someone who’s been on a desert island for sometime.  After shooting the man (I’ll just call him Padolf), Hitler muses that he has to leave in order to claim his destiny.  At this, Padolf manages one last chuckle as he dies.

Lets have a moment of silence for this character that was mortally wounded after only a single panel.

…

Hitler then tricks Eva Braun into committing suicide with the ‘ol “I promise I’ll do it at the same time…PSYCHE!” maneuver.  Kind of a dick move, when you think about it.  I mean, if she’s Catholic, then suicide is a direct trip to eternal damnation.  He could just have easily shot her, unless he wasted his last round on Padolf.  If that’s the case, he must have been emptying the clip into him just before the first panel, then paused to let the guy rant about how he wasn’t a spy.  In that context, I guess Hitler was actually being considerate.  I never expected to type that phrase.

Anyway, after being a douche and tricking his wife to death Hitler goes into his secret SCIENCE ROOM.  It has sciencey things in it, and two scientists.  They explain that the sciencey thing is actually a stasis chamber that will keep Hitler alive indefinitely.  Further, they’ve also calculated (using science, I assume) that history repeats itself exactly every 1100 years.  So, Hitler’s plan is to stay in the pod until exactly 1100 years has passed, then he’ll come out knowing how to win the war and rule the world.

Of course, if he comes out exactly 1100 years in the future, and that’s when history repeats itself, won’t the war already be lost?  He’s doing this as the Russians are actually fighting their way into the bunker…and I have no idea why they wouldn’t search the SCIENCE ROOM for 1100 years.  Yeah yeah, I know…that’s the only thing wrong with this story.

Anyway, Hitler wakes up 1100 years in the future, with long hair and a perfectly trimmed mustache with no beard.  Um…because of science?  His clothes are inexplicably ragged, so I’m guessing the stasis chamber was on “tumble dry” for the better part of a millennium.

So, Hitler wanders out of the cavern that he’s in and out into the 1970-vision-of-the-future that consists in things being shiny and impractical.  Immediately, he’s caught by two soldiers who were guarding the cavern entrance.  They assume him to be a spy and drag him to their leader, Future Hitler (Fadolf, for short).  Fadolf looks just like Hitler, except that he’s dressed in shiny and impractical space clothes.  He takes one look at Hitler and decides that he can’t be allowed to live, because he saw the super-secret SCIENCE CAVERN that Fadolf is planning to use for himself.  Huh.  His plans hinged on that room remaining a secret, but he never had anyone actually go in there?

Needless to say, Fadolf shoots Hitler, who instantly realizes that Padolf was actually just his previous iteration.  Fadolf muses about leaving to claim his destiny, and Hitler gets off one last chuckle.

Now, the point of the story is supposed to be condemned to die over and over again, and that even Hell rejects him.  I have to admit, I like the concept, but it would’ve made a lot more sense for it to be just simple time travel.  That’s not my point, though.

My point is that the comic got me thinking about time travel (this is why I’m not productive when I have internet access).  Unfortunately, I’m out of time for now…so I’ll have to save my one-man discussion on time travel for later.

Yesterday, I started discussing why I consider myself Agnostic, but I didn’t get into the details of my beliefs.  Since I’m not firing on all cylinders tonight, I’ll continue wrecking that train of thought.

I constantly hear two arguments as to why good things happen to bad people, and vice versa.  The theist argument is that God causes these events as part of some ineffable plan, whereas the atheist belief is that the events are just happenstance, and there’s no God kicking over our sandcastles.  A former girlfriend of mine actually used this argument as the key reason she became an atheist: as a child, she was baptized against her will…she even prayed for it to be prevented, and decided at the instant that her head went under the water that there was no God.  Wow, deep.

My first thought upon hearing her story, and that argument in general, is why would God stop anything that one human does to another? The entire point of free will is for people to be whatever massive assholes they feel like.  In the matter of random events, I don’t think God micromanages every subatomic particle.  When my car’s brakes failed in 2002, I don’t think it was because God cut them, Final Destination-style.  Shit happens.

Because I’m a nerd, I view life as being like a giant computer program (no Microsoft jokes, promise), and God as a programmer.  He sets the initial rules such as physical laws, then hits Start.  Here’s the QBasic version:

10 X=1

20 Exist

30 X=X+1*10^-(1*10^-10000000)

40 IF X>42 THEN A SPLODE

50 GOTO 20

Note:  Do not enter this into any QBasic editor.  It will make a universe, which violates the EULA.

Beyond that, I like to imagine he just keeps an eye on us and makes sure nothing obliterates our entire species without giving us a fighting chance.  After all, we’re pretty lucky that no giant asteroids have been crammed down our throats lately.  It’s like someone running a simulation: you don’t stop it if the results are bad, you just keep the fucker from crashing to desktop.  Again, my basis for this is absolutely nothing…it’s just a comforting prospect.

Of course, that leaves out purpose: why would an omnipotent being code the universe in Python if he wasn’t even going to throw in a few mini-games for himself?  Well, since I’m a wannabe writer, I like philosophies that tell interesting stories, rather than ones that make sense.  So, my two misguided Googlers, strap yourself in for a happy helping of batshit insane plot ideas (my actual beliefs aren’t this in-depth, I just think these are interesting concepts):

Imagine an omnipotent and omniscient being, existing because something has to.  This guy has nothing to do, no way to go home, he wants to be sedated.  Wait, hold on, I lost my train of thought again.

Oh yeah, this consciousness exists, but it has nothing to play with.  It’s not bored, because boredom hasn’t been invented yet.  On the other hand, it has no impetus to take any action, so it decides to create reasons for itself.  It’s a bit of a logical paradox, but since this consciousness has always existed, so it’s had plenty of time to be logical– a spontaneous action is overdue at this point.

Woah…I guess I have to quit this one after only one hour tonight.  I’m falling asleep as I type, which is actually a little counterproductive.  Since I don’t want to hit the same topic three nights in a row, I’ll finish my plot synopsis:

God wants other gods to hang with and challenge him, but he doesn’t want to just copy himself, so he creates an entire universe designed to be the equivalent of a random-deity-generator.  He sets the initial parameters to be conducive to life, but not comfortable for life, and the ensuing forge causes numerous species to evolve to sentience and beyond (like the Ancients in Stargate, but legally distinct).  Since he perceives all time at once, he immediately reaps the benefits as soon as initiates the Big Bang.  From the point of view of humanity (in this plot, all of human existence is basically a loading screen), however, the universe is a vast, dead, unfathomably hostile place with no rhyme or reason behind its creation.  Everyone of every species gets backstage passes to the afterlife, but only the handful of species that evolve into godhood (you have to reach level 50 and complete a bitch of a quest) get access to the VIP lounge.

Ok, I kinda rambled from discussing my own beliefs into a bare-bones story idea, but that’s really the whole purpose of these posts.  I’m not trying to just randomly share my philosophy (the only difference between “philosophy” and “bullshit” is two syllables), I’m trying to cure my writer’s block and knock the dust off my writing skills to the point where I may be able to get something published within a year.  Anyway, I’m too tired to keep going for tonight.  I’ll have to try and write for three hours straight tomorrow.  At least I have the day off.

Agnostics are simply people who believe that the ultimate reality of God is unknown and probably unknowable.  I honestly don’t see what’s so upsetting about this viewpoint.  Any devout followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam would probably agree that it’s impossible for a human to fully know God.  In fact, it’s possible to be Agnostic as well as being either a Theist or an Atheist (this is referred to as dual-classing and often incurs an XP penalty).

What it all boils down to, though, is that it’s just a label.  I called myself an Agnostic, and immediately the person I was speaking with took it upon herself to describe my beliefs to me.  The same thing happened when I described myself as a Christian: it was assumed that I followed every letter printed on the subject.  People seem to always view differing viewpoints through whatever lens is most convenient to them.  Calling myself a Christian didn’t mean that I refused to wear multi-fabric garments (Leviticus 19:19), it just meant that on the multiple-choice test Christianity was the “best fit” answer.

In truth, my beliefs haven’t really changed from when I called myself Christian, just the label I choose to describe it.  Apparently, the beliefs I held growing up weren’t technically Christian.  Who knew?  I didn’t even realize the disparity until I was in the military, passing the time on a night shift by discussing politics and religion with my coworkers.  I think it was when someone pointed out that God admits to being jealous, and that the only way to not burn in Hell for all eternity is to ask forgiveness for sins from Jesus, specifically.

First off, the thought that our time on Earth is entirely irrelevant (as long as you confess and ask forgiveness, the preceding actions don’t matter…barring suicide) doesn’t make much sense to me.  Here’s a God who would damn mankind because some guy ate an Apple (I know he was told not to, but since he didn’t have a concept of right and wrong yet, it was a bit of a Catch-22 to expect him to understand that being contrary to God was a bad thing), but is simultaneously willing to pardon rapists and murderers as long as they ask nicely?

Secondly, the description of God as being jealous or vengeful or any number of other negative things just doesn’t sit right with me.  Jealousy is a negative human emotion.  It’s a flaw.  God can’t be perfect and flawed at the same time…he’s not Schrodinger’s Deity.  Granted, being omnipotent means that he could take on whatever trait he desired; however, there’s a difference between choosing to possess a trait, and being inextricably marred by one.  For instance, if I stub my toe, I can become angry or just shrug it off.  It’s ultimately my choice.  By contrast, describing myself as being “an angry person” would mean that I punch kittens at every opportunity and have no choice in the matter.

I guess my belief is that God is, at the very minimum, humanity without the flaws and limitations inherent to the human condition.  My basis for this?  None.  This is the view that always made the most sense to me, and that’s why I chose to believe it…which is sorta the foundation of any religious belief, right?

This all explains why I don’t consider myself Christian, but doesn’t really go into why I’m not an Atheist.  It boils down to the same as before: Atheism just doesn’t make sense to me.

I love science.  I love understanding how things work, and I love reading about mind-boggling discoveries that defy all logic (the Young experiment was made of amazing).  I love reading theories as to how the universe began and how it’ll end.  My money is on heat death.  Unfortunately, as much as I love love love love science, it doesn’t have satisfying answers to some pretty important questions, such as how did the universe begin?  Don’t say “the big bang” because that’s a means, not an end, let alone a beginning.

Why would all matter and energy in the universe, after hanging around as a point of unfathomably dense goop forever (since time supposedly didn’t exist yet), decide to suddenly explode?  Did someone put tinfoil in a microwave?  Turn on a humidifier and dehumidifier at the same time?  Divide by zero?  I haven’t heard a satisfactory explanation for this.  I don’t think this is a failing of science…I’m asking for an explanation of a best-guess theoretical event that predates humanity by about 13 billion years and requires calculations so complex that they probably have their own doctorates.  However, I like my effects to have causes, so the current theory of “Hey look a baby wolf!” doesn’t really sit well with me.

Another theory I’ve read is that the big bang was caused when our universe collided with another universe (I’m a big fan of multiverse theory ever since it was discovered by Sliders).  However, that still doesn’t explain where either universe came from, or why they’d be moving around extra-dimensionally.  For that matter, why would the point of goop that exploded to become our universe even exist to begin with?  Why is anything?  I know that’s asking a bit much, since even if an answer was discovered, I’d just take another step back and say “well, why did that happen?”.

I do the same thing to my religious beliefs but, at least with those I can believe that something inherently ineffable is at play.

Well, it looks like my two hours are up once again.  On the one hand, I’m glad I can stop now, since I’m just so damned tired…but, on the other hand, I actually had a bit more to say on the subject.  I’ll err on the side of fatigue for now and leave myself with a subject for tomorrow.

I’ve recently discovered, however, that one of the integral aspects of being a writer is to occasionally write things. This is usually the step I fail at.  So, bringing things back to the “good habit” I mentioned, I’m going to start writing here.  An hour or two a day, whatever random crap I come up with.  With luck, that’ll knock an actual good idea loose.  Barring that, maybe it’ll knock a marketable idea loose.

I honestly don’t even know what sort of writer I want to be; I usually just tell people I’m a wannabe novelist (I don’t ever say “aspiring” because that implies that I’ve already put forth some sort of effort), because “wannabe writer” seems to lead folks to believe that I have journalistic intentions.  The only thing I know I don’t want to write is non-fiction.  The old saying is “write what you know” and reality is something I have very little experience with, having crawled out from under a rock shortly before joining the military.  Is that a dangling participle?  I don’t know…I should really take some more college courses on the matter.

This used to come pretty easily, at least at a passably mediocre level.  I’ve read short stories I wrote in the 90′s that seem to be much more sturdily constructed than anything I can churn out now.  None of those stories are here, by the way.  I know you must all be disappointed, you pair of people who accidentally stumbled over my blog while Googling Halo fanfiction.  Every time I sat down to write in the past two years or so, I was forcing words onto the page– like trying to get the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube.

On those rare occasions when the words came naturally, the effect only lasted for a page…two if I was lucky.  Any attempts to revisit a previous story were like editing someone else’s work: I usually don’t recognize most of the diction, and never remember where I was going with the plot.  Mostly, I don’t plan out the plot in advance.  I know, that’s not how anything good gets written, but bite me…it’s fun.  The stream of consciousness is fun, I mean, not the act of biting me.

I’ve tried the alternative, too: jotting down detailed notes about a story.  About a story’s entire world.  I’ve got one sheaf of notes in particular that details a timeline that’d cover a series of novels.  The downside is that I can’t seem to write within that scaffolding.  Apparently, my muse suffers from quantum uncertainty:  the more I know where the plot is going, the less I know where it is.

Woah.  Deep.

I guess that brings me full circle, though.  That’s the point of this entire exercise: hone my skills to the point where I actually have skills.  Writing is one of the few activities I’ve enjoyed since I first learned it (that’s not true.  I don’t remember enough that far back to make that statement -ed), and it’s one of the few things that invariably makes me happy whenever I do it (I can think of only two other activities  that always make me happy, but it’s really just the solo and multiplayer versions of the same thing -ed).  Sitting down at my computer and being completely incapable of creating even the basics of an entirely unoriginal plot is incredibly frustrating.  It was especially bad in Korea, when I had numerous opportunities to write while on 24-hour duty, but was still stymied.

I can’t help but notice that my writer’s block slammed into place around the time that I started getting real treatment for my insomnia.  Curious…

Regardless, that’s my two hours.  Looking back on what I wrote, I seemed to ramble quite a bit, and there doesn’t really seem to be two hours worth of material here.  I guess tomorrow I’ll pick a topic and try to stick with it.  Maybe theology.

I was tired of being single, so I asked myself: “where can I go to meet women with similar interests to my own?”  This prompted my next question: “what interests and qualities do I possess that I would hope to find in a woman?”  The answer to the latter was clear…I was a nerdy misanthrope with no social skills and questionable hygiene.  Where the hell do people who hate crowds congregate?  The internet.

So, like a woman returning to an abusive, redneck husband, I returned to internet dating for the– hell, I don’t know, 30th time?  Something’s different this time, though.  Maybe it’s me, maybe I’m just more confident and less concerned with the outcome.  Maybe it’s because I took my glasses off for my photo, or smiled a little bit instead of glowering menacingly at the internet.  Either way, I’m confronted with a problem I have absolutely no experience with:  too many women are responding.

Sorry, I blacked out for a second.  My previous excursions into internet dating would typically have the following result: me contacting dozens of interesting women and receiving only one response.  I’d go on a date, and maybe have a relationship for about six months to a year…but it’d be heartless and end blandly.  No fights, no screaming, no pants-crapping insanity whatsoever.  Just a simple and pleasant relationship that’d grow more distant until we each faded away.  I could scarcely call them “break-ups”.

After my previous forays yielded such pitifully sparse results, I started carpet-emailing potential matches, expecting maybe one response per 10 or 15 emails.  This time, I tried the same thing from the get-go, neither expecting nor caring about the results.  Unfortunately, after only ten emails, I have three women that want to talk to me, and another few that have sent vague emails about how funny I am, and they want to hear from me again (note:  I will not be replying).  Here’s the problem:  all three women are cute, one wants to go on a date already, one is a writer (a jackpot for me), and the third is an outgoing party-girl that likes nerds.  Son.  Of.  A.  Bitch.  How the hell am I supposed to reconcile this?  I can’t handle a social exchange with just one woman, and now I’m supposed to figure out which one I like most without screwing up with all three.  Think, penis, think…dammit I should’ve watched more sitcoms in my youth, they could’ve prepared me.

My original plan was to go to Otakon with a checklist and interview random women to determine their nerdyness quotient.  I only had a bare-bones concept of my dream girl:

1. Must like Buffy, Angel, or both.
2. Must like Firefly/Serenity
3. Must know who the hell Joss Whedon is and why he is awesome.
4. Must’ve read at least one Niel Gaiman book and be able to explain in 500 words or less (much less, preferably) why he is also awesome.
5. Must at least own a copy of House of Leaves (I was going to say “have read HoL”, but I think that might be asking too much.
6. Must know a good deal of Monty Python, and be able to keep up with me in a bout of “dueling pythons”.  Giggity.
7. Must have had at least a cursory understanding of #6, and the #6 dance.
8. Must find the reference to the #6 dance funny, not horrifying.
9. Must be find poor grammar physically painful.
10. Must have at least a working knowledge of Evanescence (don’t judge me),comic book movies, and Stargate.

Then there’s the overarching requirements:

1. Must be understanding of my hectic schedule, or at least not get pissy when I don’t return your calls at fucking midnight because I’m working like I said I was, dammit.
2. Must be old enough to drink.  Seriously.  C’mon.  Seriously.
3. Must own a fucking car…C’MON!  FUCKING SERIOUSLY!!!
4. Must be capable of killing me with one hand (I like to feel safe).
5. Must have a Zombie Plan (again, safety first).
6. Must disagree with me on religion, politics, or some other core philosophy, but be willing to vigorously debate me.  Giggity.
7. Must have her own place, preferably including at least one soundproofed room.
8. Must not be intimidated by my charming social awkwardness.  Note: social awkwardness not guaranteed to be charming.
9. Must be aware of Mitch Hedberg, or be unaware but find his style hilarious so I can take credit.
10. Must possess at least one freakish ability (preferably something in the vein of heat-vision), or at least be able to make me feel stupid on a regular basis.

After reviewing the list, it became painfully clear that I’d never find a woman that fit my criteria, especially if I printed out this list and approached women at Otakon.  My main weakness, it turns out, is the fact that women scare the crap out of me.  You see, at a young age I was horrifically mauled by a feral woman and I haven’t been able to turn left on lollerskates ever since.  Now, whenever I’m near a woman, I stricken by my medical and completely legitimate phobia of females.  This is a serious issue and in no way grounds to make fun of me.  It also causes uncontrollable urination.

Keeping this in mind, it was obvious I’d never be able to meat my dream girl in the real world.  The only alternative then, was a completely scientific experiment of posting my list on the internet and linking to it like a rabid dingo (who are infamous for their promiscuous blogging tendencies.  Read a fucking book), hoping that Summer Glau would happen upon it and call her friend, Amy Lee.  Together they would fly to my apartment (picking up Shirley Manson along the way), and make me a pizza.  It would be be best pizza ever.

The end.

There were no windows in my room, hence there was no place for a golf ball to come from, especially with the door locked (golf balls are not renowned for their skill at picking locks). With a shrug and mild disinterest, I replaced the golf ball in its cradle and went to work. Twelve apathy-laden hours later, I returned home and went straight to bed, barely glancing at the spherical resident in my wall. It wasn’t such a bad decoration, really, and it wasn’t hurting anything (except for that initial impact, of course). After being asleep for roughly– oh, I’d say not at all– I was rudely and suddenly awakened by a loud *thwock* no more than four feet from my head…in the same area as my room’s new resident. I’d lived in that barracks room for just over three years, and I’d come to recognize the odd sounds the building made as it settled at night. “Thwock” was not commonly one of those sounds. I flipped on my bedside lamp, though I already knew the source of the unwelcome noise and almost certain government property damage. I didn’t even have to put on my glasses to see the culprit: a second golf ball, slightly higher and to the right of the first.

While I didn’t care about the slight damage to undoubtedly overpriced Government drywall, this phenomenon was interrupting my sleep. After a soul-numbing twelve-hour shift, the only thing that I could muster the energy to give a proverbial “rat’s ass” about was a night of nepenthe. I climbed out of bed and, glancing quickly and completely rationally over my shoulder at the blank Wall Opposite, strode angrily over to The Wall In Question. I never could sleep while angry, so I pried both golf balls from their beds as well.

My sleep had been interrupted, and that was an act of War.