9 out of 10 monkeys believe they are not behind glass

I sometimes wonder if I have lead a particularly charmed life. A blessed life, overseen by benevolence and providence. I wonder this because my family seems to not share in similar outcomes. It makes me wonder. If god is truly looking out for me or if I have just been very lucky, either way, my behavioral responses to external stimuli would still be a product of my upbringing. I must have been raised to react well to the things that happen to me.

Or was I?

My brother was raised right alongside me. He suffers from some birth defects, true, some of his behavior has been shaped by his disability. But he has been gifted with an extraordinary intellect, so should have been able to overcome any diversity. You would think that on a fundamental level, his behaviors, mores, ethics, reactions would all be a similar if not the same as my own. Not the case.

He lacks motivation to an extreme. Whereas I am productively lazy i.e. working smart, he is just plain lazy. He can’t overcome his own fear of failure. Perhaps I don’t know the real reason. I have tried to talk to him about it, but he becomes a yes man around me, so I am sure I am not getting the whole story.

So am I product of my upbringing and my brother just happens to be a fluke? I am not so sure. My mom is a hard worker, but her luck and the situations in which she finds herself fucking suck. Pardon my french. Right now, she is in the hospital because she failed to medicate herself properly after being incorrectly dropped from her insurance. A huge culmination of very unlucky events that ended up with her in the ER unable to breathe. But then again, she could have mitigated some of that risk… Some of it had to be her lack of foresight. She does get herself into some odd situations. Almost a self destructive pattern in some ways.

So how the hell did I manage to be able to successfully function once I left home? I managed to get by, avoid the bad stuff, find the good stuff.

One could attribute it to luck, but I am sticking with the providence angle. I have been graced. Because I am not sure my parenting or my environment lead to the outcome I have experienced. It just doesn’t fit the evidence at hand.

Head scratcher. I mean I am not perfect, far from it. But there has to be some drive or some sort of quintessential property that I have and that my brother and mother lack. What it is, I just don’t know.

Perhaps I am not meant to know.

But meanwhile, I do worry. I know they need to find their own path, but sometimes I wonder if they are even looking. You have to look for it in order to follow it.

New boy in the neighborhood
Lives downstairs and it is understood.
He’s there just to take good care of me,
Like he’s one of the family.

Charles in Charge
Of our days and our nights
Charles in Charge
Of our wrongs and our rights

And I sing, I want,
I want Charge in Charge of me.

Charles in Charge
Of our days and our nights
Charles in Charge
Of our wrongs and our rights

And I sing, I want,
I want Charles in Charge of me.

Charles is a bit of a dominating slaving masochist it seems. That naughty naughty Charles.

Anthropologists two hundred years from now will watch TV from my lifetime and wonder what the hell was up with their ancestors.

My wife doesn’t know it, but she is actually the subject of a reality show called The Great Baby Experiment. Every year they pay me to make sure she has a baby and document the results to the hilarity and joy of audiences everywhere.

Today was day 1 for baby 3. I get to head home and review footage. Is she insane? Has she decided to throw in the towel? Will she be begging for baby 4? It is a mystery!

But not really. I know what is a waiting me. Chaos. A FEMA disaster site. The background for many wartime photojournalists. Dietrus and rubble spread around in liberal amounts, the shaken survior looking bleakly at the horizon of what tomorrow will bring.

Horror in black and white. Oversaturated colors and underlit spaces. A white flag fluttering softly in the wind, raised upon a push-along duck sitting in a pile of unfolded laundry.

Hopefully I will be able to get a peck on the cheek before I am taken by the typhoon that is my family and circumstance.

Finally have an app to publish via my BB. With picture support… No more having to upload shitty BB pics seperately to flickr.

Awesome.

I have been having gaming rig problems for most of the year. I thought it all started with a bad video card driver revision install in Vista when I installed back in March. Big problems. I fought it for months. Random game crashes, a whole slew of errors. Vista was a pain.

So in order to cut down on the issues, I reverted back to XP about a month ago. Still had problems. I finally conceded that I must be having a hardware problem. It had to be. The issue was so nebulous, so weird, that every time I tried to hammer it out or narrow it down, it just seemed to change shape or fail somewhere else. I tried everything. WMI repairs, driver cleanups, beta drivers, video card config, motherboard config (a bad bios flash, a new bios chip), burning candles and performing occult rights… the list is long, and dangerous, and possibly mad. But still, TF2 would crash at least once or twice a night. Regardless. Talk about frustrating.

Last week I fixed it. I pulled the memory out. I felt compelled to compare the labels. And…

THE FUCKING TIMINGS WERE DIFFERENT.

How did I miss that when I installed it (right before I installed Vista)?

Gah. What a unbelievable waste of time.

So since I fixed it, have I had a single crash in TF2? Not one.

Not only did I miss the timings, I missed the casual relationship with the issue. The memory install prior to the Vista upgrade. I made the bad assumption that my hardware was solid, it was the software at fault.

One must always remember to question one’s assumptions. Nothing is sacred, everything is questionable, especially the unquestionable.