I'm in a committed monogamous relationship. I am not on here to give anyone any kind of romantic attention, or to get any kind of it.

I'm also not really in Antarctica. I hope this is not an offensive to the fifty or so adults who might be there, none of whom should have the time or the opportunity to date while they are there. I mean what are you going to do, go to the beach and look at penguins or something? If you are living in Antarctica and you feel you should report me for telling lies, please tell me first and I will pretend move to outer mongolia or something.

My girlfriend plays my nintendo sometimes; she seems to like nintendo. I am enthusiastic about trying to find things she is enthusiastic about. So far that is only Wind Waker. I have a lot of other games though, but nobody gives a shit.

In all of those many hours in all of those many games, I have never once named Link anything but Link, and this applies to me in any other game where you are to name a character. Sometimes I have to look up if they had an "official" name, especially with older games like NES titles. She is not hard-headed like that. She calls things whatever suits her at the time.

People haven't really settled on what to call me so easily in my experience, and I have been saddled with numerous nicknames over the years. Most of the time it is at work or on elementary school playgrounds, (hopefully that era of my life is finished) and most of the time I tolerate it with difficulty, but at home when my girlfriend does it, there is an endearing holophrasis to it.

I live around Washington, D.C. and I am stuck close to my job location until I can get an academic transfer, which would require me going back to college. Or rather, to college at all.

I do not have a DC job, I am just one of the peons who make things go in the background as far as the movers, shakers and strivers are concerned. I have worked part-time in a warehouse since I was 22. Right now my main concern is figuring out if should stay til I am 52 or 47 for the early out retirement, and if enlisting would be worth it economically. I am married to the lower depths of the economy and I have no interest in ever getting a "real" job.

I would rather spend the time others spend in their offices or with coworkers goofing off on my own- or I used to; now I goof off together with my girlfriend.

I live at home with my mother and my girlfriend (I swear they are not the same person) as I have for thirty years, except for the girlfriend. She moved in more recently. I will probably never be more upwardly mobile than I am now, I have a ninth grade education and my bowels produce enough gas that if the EPA knew about it, I would have to buy offsets for greenhouse gas emissions. I feel very lucky.

We did not date and we took the physical aspect of the relationship pretty slow, but we kind of became a couple from the get-go. We both sort of disapprove of what we perceive as the popular notion of dating, and sort of a résumé-like attitude toward self-promotion and a "personal life", and this is one of the stronger binding threads in our union; that we have trollish hostility to a large group of the people on this website.

As a couple, we are still trying to get the work/life/troll balance right. Maybe we will keep hanging out here? I don't know. It could be a good place for trying to write, and trying to make friends, (as in actual friends, not eww gross friends) but only time will tell if it really is a place we can be creatively productive in.

Having opinions about things, insisting people do not understand my opinions about things, making every effort to prove myself right about that, ultimately having nothing meaningful to add or contribute to anyone else's position.

Farts

Anime Vegetative States

Poisonous Old Person Smell

Wet Blanketry

Servility

Some negative generalization or stereotype that usually comes from my failure to suck up to them socially; or if they are my boss or some other person in society I hold in contempt, then they usually think I live to serve them.

If only someone would make clones of me to serve as slaves or turn me into an indestructible cyborg, my personal compromises would finally begin to pay dividends.

After I got out of the insane asylum, I developed my assiduous love of not correcting people's impressions. It serves no purpose to: you will encounter more situations in life where people will think what they want of you than situations where they will respect your idea of your own identity.

Mostly these are just lists of things other people like used in place of actual personality, but different strokes for different folks. If you list a bunch of indie pop bands or shows everyone is talking about that are on cable, or a bunch of whatever, it will probably be less than generally instructive about your actual character and not something I would find interesting about you; my mom is a litanizer and I hate litanizers. My girlfriend hates those lists too; most especially the kind that falls into the category of anecdotal evidence. She loves adblock and can't stand commercials.

I hate what things say about people, she hates what people say about things. Classic male/female deduction/induction dichotomy.

But, lists of stuff can be used to make deductive judgements as well; and I am no exception.

When I was a kid I had a Steve Allen record called "How to Think", and I think that record messed me up for life. Maybe just the first part of it. My deduction is, it made me hypersensitive to the idea I was a poindexter for most of my childhood, or that the people around me were some kind of ignorant philistines. I think, now, that both those things were probably true.

I ate fruit snacks (the waxy processed food) very rarely during my childhood because one of the first times I ate them, I threw them up. I did not like TGI Friday's for the very same reason. From this I would say I was quick to write off things I could dismiss as dumb if I had a bad experience with them.

I had a nerf boomerang. It was green. I played catch with myself a lot, I would try and throw it up at an angle and get it to come right back down to me. Boomerangs did not seem to work as suggested by 80s adventure cartoons, or Xena Warrior Princess.

During my childhood, I wanted to like my chemistry set, my microscope, my model rocket kit I never bothered to put together. I had a lot of things I didn't get good at that I wanted to, but I don't remember too much that I did or experienced that I would have called much of a favorite. I read almost all the Hardy Boys books. I don't even vaguely remember them. Something about Chet and a jalopy.

I rented Tremors and The Hunt for Red October from the library more times than I had any desire to. My mom would go there to rent movies, which to her meant PBS and BBC crap or something edumacational for my little sister, and they didn't carry more than a handful of "hollywood" movies. Every week I would ask if they had something I wanted to see or knew about at the time, and they wouldn't. I would then dejectedly rent Tremors or The Hunt for Red October again.

I hated my childhood; I think I thought of it as something to endure and escape. I grew old, but not up. I still like the idea of comic books and horrible action movies and somehow magically mastering some feat of intellect so obviously beyond my capacity, such as setting the clock on my car stereo; the fantasy weapons that were supposed to win us the cold war, the future where the crap everyone has been talking about happening since my mother was an undergraduate actually happening; but all of it just feels like escapism now. Worrying over the long term consequences of the Arab Spring or global warming or the solvency of Social Security or bird flu, all those things are just fantasies where you don't have to imagine your future life as an unbroken continuum with the tedium of your present.

Now life is weird; I'm not single anymore. I can't shit on my own life and not get called out on it. I have a job which is zero stress for me and actually keeps me healthy. I have a place to stay that costs me practically nothing and is bought and paid for. My car runs. I can do what I want in my spare time. I have my girlfriend's endless circle of friends to meet. I am demonstrably better off than some of them, some of them with better jobs and better educations and more household wealth.

What did I want to accomplish with my life? Who did I want to avoid? I have to look at all of that again.

I need to plug the usb cable back into my car stereo. I still buy CDs, almost always just off of amazon. Need to start streaming video to my tv set so I can watch netflix on something nicer than a little LCD monitor. I bitched verizon into sending me a new router because the old one I had, I had to manually reset the MTU size in order to get pages to load on a Windows 7 machine; took me forever to figure that one out. The new one has a USB 3.0 port and I should probably figure out if there is a good way for me to stream content off it to my downstairs TV. Paige and I are halfway through Maison Ikkoku. She hides in the bedroom to avoid my mom, who is kind of a living room hog, but maybe there is a way for me to change things. I need to get back to marathoning Gatchaman and Uchuusen Sagittarius. I need to turn her into a cineaste like me, or at least find things to watch together I have not seen already.

It is a little less compelling than it used to be for me, as now all art kind of spins around the same axis of the universals of living experience. I kind of feel like it is all the same movie, all the same song, lots of covers of the same tune.

I like hand tools: machetes, Seymour makes a nice grass whip, Lesche Products makes a very nice shovel, I am content with my electric chainsaw and my chipper shredder. I got a cool plastic baseball bat a little while ago and a neat demolition hammer. There is a whole universe of things like that; lockpicking tools and astronomical binoculars and pellet rifles and leatherman tools and h2g2-esque kindles and all sorts of things, material objects you can hold onto and carry and imagine adventures. Life is portable, but then again it isn't. My girlfriend and I could get in her RV and abandon all our commitments and go see as much of the world as we could drive to, but there is more to life than where you can go hang out. Tools are tools; they are a means to an end. So are the films, the books, the music: food for thought, a past-time. What is the purpose of a tool, what is the purpose of liking things?

Along that line: food does that for the body. I like to imagine I am eating well. I am glad you like mustard greens, Paige. I like them, too.

She hates a lot of aromatic spices. My mother is the same way. It scares me- am I marrying my mother? What do all you people have against Basil and Cilantro? What did Pesto do to you?

Borderline Personality Disorder

Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder

Morbid Jealousy

Oppositional Defiant Disorder

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Ultradian Bipolar Disorder

The ingredients in Egyptian Goddess Perfume Oil are supposedly Lotus, Myrrh, Storax, and musk. Storax is my favorite because I didn't know it existed until I looked this up.

You have run out of sane people to have arguments with; and you understand and respect the boundaries of other people's relationships.