I’m just going to copy and paste this here, it’s more efficient that way:

xaxio: It’s…I wish you could see it…
xaxio: Ummmm
xaxio: Cottage. Snow.
xaxio: Woman with very curly, long, light red hair.
xaxio: I’m in a country that isn’t America.
xaxio: Supposedly visiting this lady, who is perhaps a distant cousin or something.
xaxio: I’ve been to her cottage before, but don’t know it or remember it.
xaxio: She goes off to work.
xaxio: I spend the day wandering around.
xaxio: She comes back.
xaxio: She goes off to work the next day.
xaxio: I spend the day wandering around the snow-filled countryside again. We’re in a small village. There are mountains nearby.
xaxio: She comes back. She tilts her head sideways. She says she forgot something.
xaxio: I offer to walk her back to work, as she always walks there.
xaxio: She says no, she can make it on her own.
xaxio: I follow her anyway. She doesn’t know it. She starts to ascend a steep slow, at times climbing short distances.
xaxio: She gets to the top of the slope. She starts walking toward a building.
xaxio: I look to the left and there’s a perfectly good driveway there.
xaxio: I wonder why she doesn’t take the driveway.
xaxio: I don’t know that if you take the driveway to the top, you end up at a different place.
xaxio: She goes in the building. I go in the building. White walls, sparse art, white tile floor.
xaxio: Black dog hair on the white floor.
xaxio: No idea where my cottage lady went.
xaxio: Some other lady is inside. I start to get dizzy. I say, “I’ve been here before…but the dog hair, it wasn’t black…it’s not supposed to be black…something is wrong…”
xaxio: The woman stands up. I start to feel heavy. I stumble outside
xaxio: I head to the side of the building. There’s a small shed in the back.
xaxio: I start to head to that, but end up feeling even more heavy and collapse onto the ground.
xaxio: The woman I didn’t recognize on the inside had done something to me.
xaxio: I can’t get up. I hear my cottage mate come out of the building I was just in and I know that if she sees me here that she’ll kill me, or something equally bad will happen.
xaxio: She walks around to the side where I am, and walks right past me, like she doesn’t see me.
xaxio: I glance around to try to follow her movement as she walks past, but I can’t really move my head.
xaxio: The heaviness has lifted, but I still can’t move my body. The feeling that the lady on the inside had done something passed.
xaxio: Whatever was keeping me from moving now was saving me, because it was keeping the curly-haired lady from seeing me.
xaxio: Then I notice something I hadn’t noticed before a short distance from me in the snow.
xaxio: A white dog in the snow, so white that it blended right in.
xaxio: And white eyes. Unnaturally white eyes. I’m getting cold. And I know the dog is saving me.
xaxio: The black dog hair was wrong, it shouldn’t have been on the floor. It should have been the hair from this dog that was on that floor.
xaxio: Curly-Hair is still looking around, and doesn’t see me in the small shed out back, and so starts to walk back toward the building.
xaxio: She pauses and looks around. I see that her eyes have turned unnaturally white. She says in a cold voice that I didn’t think she could manage, “I know you’re out here. You’re out here and I’m going to find you.”
xaxio: I think she’s talking about me. Maybe she was, I don’t know.
xaxio: Maybe she was talking about the dog.
xaxio: I’m lying there, she keeps looking around, not moving from that spot. Suddenly I’m able to move again — but I don’t.
xaxio: I see that a net of snow (or something else white, anyway), had formed over the dog near me. It started to heat up around the dog.
xaxio: I could tell it was hurting the dog and that it would start to burn through its flesh soon. Curly-Hair was still searching, she hadn’t seen that her net had caught the dog.
xaxio: I stand up, I can’t stand to see the dog get hurt.
xaxio: She sees me.
xaxio: I run and dive down the driveway. She follows.
xaxio: There’s snow on the ground, packed well, and I slide off the side of the driveway and hit my head on something.
xaxio: I come to. Curly-Hair is standing over me.
xaxio: I don’t immediately remember anything of what just happened. She sees that I don’t and her demeanor changes.
xaxio: She’s the warm caring person I knew again suddenly.
xaxio: I ask her where I am.
xaxio: She says I fell and hit my head outside. She offers to make me some soup and starts to head up the driveway.
xaxio: I say, “Umm…( and then I said her name, but I can’t freakin’ remember what it was….)…can you help me up?”
xaxio: She stops and blinks as if it hadn’t occurred to her. She says, “Oh. Right.” and comes back to help me up. Together we walk back up the driveway, but the building that is at the end of it is not the one that was there before.
xaxio: I don’t know that, though, because I don’t remember.
xaxio: All I know is that something is strange and not-quite-right.
xaxio: And then I woke up.

The most important part of the whole thing was her name, and I can’t remember what it was….

I’m watching an anime full-screen right now called “Lucky Star”. I read the description before watching it and didn’t really want to watch it, but I thought I’d experience it anyway just to further my knowledge. I thought I’d turn it on for a minute or two, watch it, and then discard it as a childish cartoon. Unfortunately, the opening song is so fast-paced that it immediately caught my attention in a worse way than a television jingle. The chick who seems to be the main character, despite being both smart and athletic, doesn’t use all of her skills. She doesn’t join sports clubs at school or get good grades. The lack of grades is due to her disregarding the given homework.

Instead, she plays online video games and watches anime all day. When she’s talking to her friends at school, she bumbles on about her online video game friends even though they don’t necessarily understand her. During the episode, she actually describes her real life and her online video game life as being one and the same. It’s kind of sad in one way, but it describes the progression of video games and the psychology of world society through technology in another way. I can definitely relate to her friends in that way, especially around OmegaBot.

OmegaBot will slip out of talking about the video game areas/item/character statistics and into talking about real world objects as they would be reflected if they were in the game played. It’s quite amazing, really. I occasionally want to reach over and poke OmegaBot in the shoulder and say “Come back to the real world!”, and sometimes I do something of the sort. Most often, though, I stop myself and think about how boring the real world can be at times and try to imagine myself in the game world. I don’t always succeed, but by the time I fail I just don’t care anymore and I’ve moved on to thinking about something else or I’ve zoned off into my own little world. Of course, if I fail to imagine myself in the video game world and zone off into my own little world, people start thinking that something is wrong because I can’t relate to the conversation and have stopped talking. The thing is, it doesn’t matter to me at that point (usually).

I’m already in my own zone at that point, watching things happen around me that aren’t really happening. In that way, you could say that there is a similarity between being lost in my head and somebody else treading the social line between virtual life and real life. I’ll go and tread the line between imagined life and real life (aka daydream — I consider this both a source and a symptom of “extreme empathy”). Whilst the gamers are weaving their discussions in such as way as to intertwine real time and game time, I’m already looking out the window and walking down the street. I’ll occasionally stop to read an advertisement, or a poster on a wall. I’ll make my way back to the place where I’m sitting and start moving people’s things around, rifling through their bags, and listening to their conversations. I’ll sit next to them and joke around with them and maybe even provide some useful ideas. Perhaps then I’ll go sit on the floor and watch the room as if from a reverse perspective, seeing myself staring off into the distance, seeing the gamers become animated about their intertwined lives…no…I have to come up with a name for that now. I shall call it… “The Qwerty Perspective”.

The Qwerty Perspective. An original thing, my own term. They’re seeing the world through a keyboard’s or computer’s view, but also putting their input from this world back into the keyboard when they get a chance. They’re speaking a language that both gamers and non-gamers can understand, although the game specific terminology can get a little muddy to non-gamers, and the gamers who aren’t present would require real-world context to understand the similarities being drawn between the game and real life. I can’t say anything like “it’s a trap into which the unimaginative fall”, because that would make it sound like a bad thing, and it’s not necessarily. I actually think it’s a positive thing that games and computers can help people describe things with words where they would otherwise not have such a description. Through the Qwerty Perspective, people can relay emotions and describe things in a way (although game-specific at times, unfortunately) that allows another person to empathize with them more deeply. Through such empathy, bonds are formed. The Qwerty Perspective is a GOOD thing. No, that’s not Martha. I will, however, say that the truly imaginative people out there stand to bury original perspectives under the Qwerty Perspective and that it could take them years to recover.

Extreme empathy. Hmmm…for fun, I looked that up just now. I came up with this article, which describes very briefly something called mirror-touch synaesthesia (MTS). (I haven’t taken this, but for those of you interested, here is your empathy quotient.) [I believe that the best massage therapists have MTS.] When I say extreme empathy, I don’t mean MTS. I mean it in the sense of the word that my mind puts me in their place. This is one of the reasons that I have trouble watching horror movies. I don’t like feeling the pain of the characters. The scene with the patient and the eyes in 28 Weeks Later left me somewhat scarred. The memory of that pain is almost too unbearable to handle. I am EXTREMELY thankful that my mind is already starting to bury that.

MS messaged me a little over an hour ago — sorry MS, I’m not ignoring you!

There’s SO MUCH to write about right now…and I’m getting tired again. I’m tired a lot these days, but I think it has to do with work. Work…hmmm…so much stuff going on there lately. I’m dealing with some complex clients at work, and tomorrow…well…today at this point, I have to go train somebody else to deal with the clients so that I can get back to doing my normal job. I have a day to train this person, but the clients take a month to learn. I have a feeling that the trainee and I will be interacting rather closely over the next month until the clients are learned. Yes, I’m writing in passive voice on purpose. Shut yer beautiful traps and deal with it, grammar majors.

I really wanted to do DDR/ITG today (this brings to mind what it would be like if Pepsi had children), but I ended up taking a much needed nap instead. Hopefully between that and the sleep I get tonight, I won’t have trouble waking up early this morning. *insert yawn here*

Dang it!!!! I can’t stop surfing. And as such, I’ve decided that Yuri Ebihara is now one of the most beautiful AND cute women on the planet. Okay. Bedtime.

First thing’s first — I’m getting a cold sore, and I don’t like it. Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about it. I guess that just means I don’t get to taste any Pepsi this weekend. There are plenty of other fun things to do though, I s’pose. The forecast says that there’s a 30% chance of rain on both Saturday and Sunday, so that’s a “maybe” to beach weather. At least it’s only going to be a high of 89 degrees this weekend.

You have to understand when I say “only”, though. Monday night, 06/11/2007, my air conditioner decided to break. I guess I need to look on the bright side, though. At least I wasn’t a Catholic in Cologne on this day in 1964. Anyway…I didn’t sleep at all on Monday night. Period. At 4:30 AM on Tuesday, 06/12/2007, I gave up trying to sleep when I realized that it was 84 degrees in my apartment, and the sun hadn’t even come up yet. I simply drove into work and started working in the air-conditioned office. Calls every 2 hours to the landlady finally proved fruitful and an air conditioner repairman was sent out to fix the problem. I met him here, in my NINETY DEGREE APARTMENT.

Fixing the problem meant that I finally met my downstairs neighbor, PoliceGirl, as my air conditioner electrical lines run down through her air conditioner closet as well. She was born in the same state as me We struck up a lively conversation in the awkward lull while the repairman was out gathering the tools of his trade. We both told our entire life stories to each other in under two and a half minutes each. I was rather impressed, actually. I hope I get to interact with her more, she really was cool.

So…he fixed it, I left, he left, everybody’s happy. Then I get a call from Pepsi telling me that Gator(yeah, from Gainesville) is in my area and implying that it’s my duty to keep the Gator sufficiently amused for at least a short time. I’m dead tired. What to do, what to do…I know! I’ll agree to meet Gator, chug a power peanut butter smoothie, and then wear myself out at the local arcade for free. That took all of three hours to do. But hey…I did my duty.

Now I’m dead tired, but I can’t sleep just yet. I think it’s because I was very very awake at this same time yesterday morning. I also blame the wonderful (that’s not sarcasm, but I don’t know how to get you to believe me) people over at Questionable Content for one of the best webcomics *ever*. Read these comics, I implore you. It’s like a story about my life, even my life right now! Methinks the author has been secretly watching me for years to create this masterpiece.

I think that’s all I can handle. I also think that one of the reasons that I can’t sleep is because I need to take a shower. G’night.

Orlando Door Code name: Pepsi

This is the best freakin’ Pepsi I’ve ever had, I have to at least say that much. I’ve only leaked again one time since, and that was when I was down in FTL for work and I had to go to the emergency room for severe bronchitis. I was coughing up blood and I wondered if I was going to die or something stupid like that (as if *I*, of all people, could die) without ever telling Pepsi…well…the things that you tell Pepsi. (For those of you who talk to your Pepsi, like me)

Anyway, I had some Pepsi the weekend after I went to the ER and things started to feel better and shape right up Talk about a magic potion!

So…I’ve updated the blogging software once again. I have the latest and best version of it (I *do* try to keep up with it) as of last night.

Last night, I also enjoyed some DDO One Liners. It’s such a fun game, and the characters are also fun. Unlike a conventional MMO, there’s no grinding necessary. You spend the first 20 minutes learning the basic controls of the game, the next hour playing with a slightly more advanced area and learning what it’s like to play with other characters, and then SHAZAM!!!(thanks VG Cats!) you get plunged into the world of creative parties, escaping traps, and figuring out puzzles.

A real RPG…who would have thought? I’m considering taking up casually playing again sometime in the future…after all, Pepsi plays FFXI. Why can’t I play stuff, too?

Now, let’s get down to the lemon of the story. The lemon, you say? That’s right. Sometimes people have lemons with their Pepsi. Strange, but true. It’s not my personal taste, but it seems to be working out lately. Lemons are a fine fruit, if used properly. However, I like the lemon floating in the Pepsi, maybe adding a little spark to the flavor, but I don’t like it mixing with the Pepsi. I’m not the kind of person that enjoys having lemon squeezed in and mixed thoroughly with my Pepsi. With lemons, no matter how good they are, you can only have so much of them. You have to draw a line saying, “Here is the lemon. Here is the Pepsi. A lemon is not Pepsi, and a Pepsi is not a lemon.” The flavors need to remain distinct and zingy. I don’t mind drinking Pepsi slowly, or quickly, or however I feel like drinking it. I enjoy letting the Pepsi sit on my taste buds for a bit before drinking. I do NOT want to have a lemon do the same thing. As such, I shall occasionally be eliminating the lemon completely from the Pepsi just to make sure that my taste buds know the difference between a good drink and a nasty one (because too much lemon ruins the drink), and to teach the lemon that no matter how good it is in moderation, it is still a lemon.

Sorry, lemon…if you want to mix completely, you need to find some 7-Up or some Sprite. I’m not eliminating you from my beverage repertoire, but I am reducing you so that you find the RIGHT mix for you.