There once was a boy...

Still a bit shell-shocked about recent events, worried about a possible world war coming up, pouring out his newfound frustration in an article on his web site, a good friend of the boy said that perhaps it should be posted on this odd website called everything 2.

The boy signed up to the website, and posted his first writeup (of course, first under Home Node, then under writeup, but finally the dim-witted kid got to grips with things and managed to post it under the right title. Instantly labeled a troublemaker and a troll, the gods and editors just didn't know what to do with him.

12 months...

My life has changed tremendously the past year, and E2 has been quite a part of it. The new friends I have found here are in many ways closer to me than most other people. My writing has improved tremendously (mostly due to one noder's mission to teach the SharQ how to spell :), and I feel I have become part of this big pile of perl-and-mysql.

So.. What has the 12 months given me? Time for some statistics.

Writeups written.................... 388          
Total removed writeups............... 79
Removed writeups..................... 53*
Remaining writeups.................. 309 


Number of chings.................... 228
Cool ratio........................... 73.79 %
Total upvotes...................... 6871
Total downvotes..................... 865
Reputation of "live" nodes......... 6006
Total rep of nuked nodes............ 170
Total XP........................... 9577


Level................................. 5
Level in honor roll................... 7
Highest rep writeup................. 161
Node-Fu.............................. 31
Merit................................ 15.1
Devotion........................... 4671


*) this number excludes nuke requests etc

(some of the info in this list comes from Conform's excellent node tracker)

Those statistics were rather dry, weren't they? Perhaps include some cooler statistics then.

My nodes, sorted by topics (one node can be in several topics):

Pyrotechnics......................... 22 (Favourite)       
Arts (music, literature, movies)..... 59 (Favourite)
Politics............................. 14 (Favourite)
Photography.......................... 75 (Favourite)
Dwaddle writeups..................... 34 (Favourite)
Technology........................... 52 (Favourite)
Definitions, how-tos and listings.... 39 (Favourite)
Biographies and historical........... 41 (Favourite)
Places and events..................... 5 (Favourite)
Fighting and weapons................. 10 (Favourite)
Lyrics and short stories............. 11 (Favourite)

But hardly alone..

I did survive my first year here on E2, but it has been a bumpy ride. A few heated arguments with editors and gods - nicely combined with the fact that quite a few of my writeups are provocative at best, and that I at times have a rather short fuse (pun intended) - has made it rather interesting.

Lots of good stuff has happened too, though. Despite a rough winter (the ones who helped me out of that mess know what I am talking about. Thank you.) and a messy beginning of the spring, the past year has been superb. On my 3-month E2 anniversary I went to my first nodermeet, and I have been to.. eh.. 4-5 since then, getting to know new noders every time. A strange breed, we are.. But 'tis all good.

I am not going to thank anybody individually, because I'll only end up forgetting people - not because you aren't important, but because there are just so incredibly many great people here on E2.

Keep it up, everybody. You are all much loved!

*takes a deep breath, and is ready for another year of noding*

- SharQ

-30-

Sometimes it starts with some sort of question...

"Do you think writeups show too much information?" "Have you become so tired of the same old hints that aren't very useful after you're level 2 or so?" "Are you tired of suffering?"

Sometimes it's a fact thrown right at you "Now Available..." or "Now in your user settings..."

And once, I even recall being informed after the fact "You probably noticed..." I mean, that's just not right, just let me logon and read some daylogs and node a bit and suddenly nothing will ever be the same!!!

Are you all insane?! I am all for change and progress but somethings just shouldn't change! If it ain't broke, don't fix it, is what I always say! Imagine what would happen if we start giving out information and new hints to everyone who wanted them?! Eh?! I am as liberal as the next guy, but some things are just too much!

This whole everything2 experiment has gone much too far. I think it's time to give us back E1!!! And if we are on the subject, I propose going back 5.25 floppies! And Donkey Kong! (Where did this Luigi guy come from anyways?!) And I don't think it's just about computers! NO SIRIE! Didn't you like it all so much better when there were 3 major American television networks? ABC, NBC, and CBS every child knows that is how it should be.

And mixed games between the National League and American League that's just plain sick!

I'll tell you when it all started... New Coke. 'nuff said.

Stop the insanity! Just say no!

I never actually was on E1... now was I? hmmm....

This uneasiness permeates my being...so stifling. Needing much and wanting more, never knowing how to go about acquiring. These days it's all so tiresome and I sleep in a shell of fitful partial consciousness. All you have in me is this teetering child, baring her knuckles in the face of anticipation and anxiety. Fighting the invisible enemy has never drained me so thoroughly. I am flushed with a sense of impending doom and I know that hour by hour its increase weighs heavy, then heavier....but I know a light. From within it flickers. Like a string pulling from the center of my chest it lifts and combats the burden bearing down. If only for an instant, if just a modicum of reprieve, I am gifted the glimpse of something enduring spun of hearts and bones.

It turns out I'm just paranoid and the world is full of lovely people!

And lovely people love apples!

I'm eating raw cookie dough and wondering why the cafeteria never has healthy options for vegetarians...

Lovely people: One stopped by the house this morning to work on a paper. I was asleep and he wanted to leave a note for me but he forgot. Amy wonders if I feel squeamish talking to him on the phone... she smiles when we talk about him... it's that knowing smile of the matchmaker - does she want us to start dating? No way! Amber understands why I can't be around him for more than a few hours. He loves me for some odd reason but he is so immature.

Another is downstairs working on homework. He continues to amaze and amuse me every day. I've never met a boy who cared so much about others. He's mean and witty but it's all in jest. I want to be best friends with him forever. I want to lie next to him and talk for hours. This is not a sexual thing.

Another is partying for her suitemate's birthday tonight. I said I would go over but I think I might just stop by and use the oven. I do have a few papers to write and a few cookies to bake. However, I fear the tempting thought of Amber might keep me around past my bed time.

Thank you lovely people for brightening my day - you know who you are.

And I'm off to make some care packages for lovely noders. Do you want one too? I know you want my package! (What a joke!)

Ookay. Time to get over the fear of writing-my-first-wu... This is probably the least harmful place. :) I bet I'll forget capital letters, and html formatting, and a zillion other things. Ah well.

Now... what should I write about? Hmm. I use "..." too much (and can't be bothered to find out the proper word right now, so nyahh). Aanyway. Perhaps I should rant about the evils of school, or room-temperature milk, or giant green fruit loops...

There's always something to rant about at school. I'm currently looking for games for my TI-89 (suggestions & urls welcome, I'm lazy :) so that I don't die of boredom in math and career prep.

Ah, math. very rarely am I not bored there. My grade 2 teacher refused to let me work ahead in class, I got bumped up to math 5 halfway through grade 3 by the principal (actually, I spent the first week of grade 2 in a grade 3 class, because I'd come from England where they actually teach 6-year-olds to multiply...). By grade 8 I was used to being bored in math, and since my middle school had no math 9 textbooks, I got to go to the nearest high school in the afternoons. :) I got away with doing no homework until math 11, when things started to get interesting... and I was only in grade 9, so I hadn't adjusted to the idea of actually doing work. Didn't do great in math 12 the next year, either (got a C+, the lowest I need for a decent college course is a B), so now I'm redoing it, in grade 12. Not at the IB level, though, at the dumbed down "normal" level. And they've watered down the course since last time I took it, too. I'm trying to get out of it and just write the exam- some teachers have told me it can't be done, others say they don't see why not, and I haven't got a reply from the teachers that supposedly control these things yet. Ah well, we'll see. Oh, and did I mention the course now has a lot more of the part of math I like least, statistics? Eevil. The first contest isn't until sometime in November, too... math contests are fun. :)

Hmm. I could continue ranting about the evils of english, and career prep, and a million other things I'm sure hardly anyone here is interested in... but I keep getting distracted, and I should sleep. maybe I'll have a weird dream that I can put in the dream log thingy :)

Driving down Greensprings Highway today.

See a billboard, major brand of bottled water. Girl's not drinking the water from the bottle, it's a cumshot with the water bottle where the dick would be, water splashing all over her face. She smiles like she likes being degraded this way.

Continue on, thinking that maybe the Baptists are right, we are creating hell instead of going there. Porn is for the bedroom, not for the roadside.

I shake the whole eeriness thing. Go on, pass two cars, see another billboard and metaphorically stop cold. I CAN VOTE - Mentally Ill And Mentally Handicapped Have Rights Too - a message from the alabama department of mental health and handicap. Black on white, text only. And that's cool, I guess I just wasn't expecting it.

Composure eventually regained but left leg shaking and I'm full of The Fear. I make it into the Purple Onion, and the guy in front of me in line is wearing a button. Black on white, text only.

THIEVES AND RAPISTS UNITE.

- Robert Goddam

Meow.

So we finally moved into our new home. Ahh nice. We spent the day unpacking the critical stuff: Kitchen wares and clothing in our master bedroom.

Meow.

Folks, I can't stress this enough: label your boxes properly, on top and on at least two sides. Professional movers unloaded close to a hundred cardboard boxes in all rooms. You do not want to dig out and untape fifty boxes just to find one little essential item, say, your telephone.

Meow.

Moving into a new house axiom: The electrical, telephone and cable outlets are never where you want them. I had to drill the hardwood floor (three times) in order to run some TV cable and surround speakers wiring. Finished basements with suspended ceiling tiles are a godsend.

Meow.

Finally, after a hard day's work we were able to retire to bed.

Meow.

"AH SHADDUP YA STUPID CAT!"

Meow.

"There's no door in the basement, we can't lock up the cat."

Meow.

"This is going to be a long night."

Meow.

"Sigh. Tomorrow, I'm getting a door at Home Depot."

Adventures in Moving--Part 3 Next

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein today complied with US demands that he hop on one leg and whistle Yankee Doodle Dandy out of his asshole.

A skeptical President Bush called it a stalling tactic, noting the Iraqi leader failed to stick a feather in his hat and call it macaroni.

"We've seen this before," Bush said. "At the end of hostilities in 1991, the UN required Hussein to perform YMCA but his C looked more like an F. That's the kind of man we're dealing with here. A man who will drop nerve gas on his own people and not do popular wedding dances the way they're intended."

The 15-member U.N. Security Council meets later Tuesday to review Hussein's performance.

I just finished watching Waking Life... the movie finished, and 20 minutes later, I realized I hadn't yet moved from my seat. I was staring at a blue screen on my tv for 20 minutes.

Now, my brain is on fire with all of these random thoughts, and just five minutes ago, they seemed coherent, part of a gestalt

My thoughts have turned to mortality alot lately, more than I'd like to admit. but tonight, they dropped back into mortality, death; but it wasn't morbid in the least - I suppose my thoughts turned to the figurative view of death as transformation from one form to another.

In my life, I've nearly died 3 times (or, I've come close, at least). Once was at the hand of nature (or god, or goddess, or take your pick), once was at the hands of someone else, and once was my own doing.

Now, I don't remember the first time, it was when I was a baby; I was born with pneumonia, and was intubated for a few weeks.

I had actually forgotten about the second time for quite awhile. That one was at the hands of my stepfather. He was a good ole' boy from the south, and when he married my mother, I despised him. We used to argue all the time, and on occasion, he would remind me who the boss was in the house. The last time he ever laid his hands on me, he beat me into unconsiousness. When I came around, the room was dark, and I wasn't sure where I was - for awhile, I thought I was dead, or in a coma; things were very surreal and detached. I couldn't stand, or focus on anything... and the strangest thing happened, I was filled with this sort of inner peace, this feeling that I had just been reborn, that I had regained my grasp on the universe - that this knowledge that I once had but had long lost had returned to me. I was filled with this sense of wonder and amazement.

Over time, that feeling fled me of course. My stepfather rarely spoke more than 2 or 3 words to me at a time after that. He's recently been making phone calls to apologize about how he was with me when I lived with him, he even called my mother to apologize to her. I guess she had no idea what was going on, because he was good with my little brother.

But I digress.

The third time (I nearly over-dosed), I also remember the peace that came the day after, and the feeling that I had regained something that I had lost.

Now, I'm not saying that I've only felt this thing at these particularily painful times in my life, but they've come and gone for as long as I can remember.

But, watching this movie, these mixes of colors painted on my retinas and transmitted to my brain; I started thinking - what if I had actually died on those days, and I've not realized it. I suppose in a way I did die on those days, because I was never the same thereafter, I was reborn, things changed dramatically for me every time.

In a more metaphysical sense, perhaps that feeling denoted a time when I *did* die in some sort of parallel existence, and the goings on in my particular realm of influence brought me close enough to the events at hand that I was able to tap into whatever it is that people experience once they've succumbed to the eternal sleep.

Which brings me even deeper into my thoughts of mortality. I've had this horrible stroke of luck where someone I know dies every year. this year, I didn't know about it when it happened, but an old friend of mine was killed on her way to work a couple of months ago. I just discovered this on friday. it was incredibly surreal to me - I knew her very well for a few weeks right after my first year in college and I had gone back home to visit my family; and we had just spoken after not being in touch for three years. Christ, when did we talk? It must have been February then.

Anyways, she died, and now I think of the possibilities that she may be alive in some sort of parallel universe / other dimension / all things exist at all times sense of the univers. it doesn't make things any easier for me, nor any harder; but instead, curious about all of the possibilities that I *didn't* choose, combined with all of those that I *have* chosen, and I wonder how it could be possible that I'm here today, that I've just watched this movie about almost the very same thing, and the infinite number of possibilities that would have had to have occurred to get here.

Regardless, I do have a point here. all of these things have been dragging me down lately, these silly, unimportant things; when really, life is short, and while I haven't feared death for quite some time, I do fear wasting the time that I have alotted, whether it's 12 hours, 12 weeks, 12 years, or whatever. And now I'm fortunate enough to realize, all I need to make my life complete is to just realize that I'm lucky to be alive. That everything has it's place.

I can respect these small things now, and I do. I take a breath, and I hold it deep in my lungs.

Everything is fine.

Yet another day where one of my former basketball player passes from the game. First it was Larry Bird, then Sir Charles of Barkley. As was expected for a short while now, the once star center for the New York Knicks is retiring. After 17 years of B-ball, Patrick Ewing is hanging up his jersey. Ewing played for the Knicks for all but the last two years of his professional career. Before the 2000 season he was traded to the Seattle Supersonics, and played his last year with the Orlando Magic. Patrick Ewing is currently 40 years old.

So what does a retired 7 foot tall basketball player do with his spare time? He could set up a basketball camp and teach kids how to make baskets like he did (Ewing had 23,665 points with the Knicks alone). Not Patrick, instead he is going to be an assistant coach with the Washington Wizards. Yeap, the team with Michael Jordon, who's Bulls won 6 championships, with four of them being over the Ewing-led Knicks. Even though Patrick has never won an NBA championship, he was still named as one of 50 greatest players to ever play the game.

Patrick had a full career. He currently holds several team records for the Knicks and has played the game during a special age in the NBA. While Patrick never had Shaq's intimidation and size to go with him, he always played hard, having great contests against Hakeem Olajuwon and Charles Barkley. He was coached by Pat Riley and Jeff Van Gundy during his tenure with the Knicks. The time is approaching when all the basketball players I once looked up to will be gone. At least John Stockton is still playing ball for the Jazz, I think. Anywho, Here's to a legend.

I read on the side of a building in downtown Baltimore today while I was eating a tuna fish sandwhich that someone sprayed in orange spray paint "Fuck the guys who did this." That is the wackiest thing I ever saw in my entire life. I think that is as ironic as being a cleaning lady and going to the bathroom on the floor after you mop for seven hours which is part of a joke someone told me once that was funny. Not so much anymore because I don't retall jokes quite so funny expecially ones that involve curse words and peeing.

I think I had a pretty good day today though. Except for a couple things that upset me and maybe shouldn't have upset me except they did. This woman I work with was selling cookies she bought in the store to raise money for local victims of 9/11 and I didn't buy any so she called me a rude name. That is crazy and where will this all end? It will end in a big war is what it will end up in and buying cookies for someone in Baltimore who was related to someone in New York so they can get a new blanket is crazy talk. Then this other big loudmouth guy at work was walking around talking about Saddam Hussein and saying "Throw down. Throw down!" for about a half hour and laughing up a storm. This is bad stuff and I'm going to start doing some more praying especially since I missed church this week. People are getting nuttier by the every single day in this country and either their waving flags or their wanting a war or their selling something under stupid reasons. What is next to buy? Extra bacon bits on your caesar salad to pay for a plaque on the ground zero?

I thought I met a woman today where I went for lunch she seemed nice and we talked about model aircraft building and I've done my share of that both with balsa wood and plastic. I have fingers that are too big for the delicate work and they never looked the way they were supposed to but I tried doing my best to make it work. It is a good thing I wasn't building planes for Boeing or we wouldn't have to worry about terrorists. I'm a sloppy building which is why I got into collectables that are already built so I can just admire them and keep track of their value on the collectables market. This woman walked away after I gave her my business card and she put it in the ashtray near the door on the way out I know because I saw it in there when I left. I hope she knew I wanted a personal relationship and not to sell her something whcih you always wonder about when you work in sales.