On Decemeber 31st, 2005, I had this to say:
“I don’t make new year’s resolutions. I just like to believe in things enough to make them happen. So this year I think I’ll publish a game and fall in love and be more still and be more me.”
All that happened in 2007 instead of 2006.
This year I would like to expand upon those concepts and turn them loose once again: “I’d like my game to grow, for someone to fall in love with me, and to be one me.”
Let’s see if that works out better.
“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t to forget make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”
– Neil Gaiman
Last week my company graciously flew my back to Albuquerque to participate in the company Christmas party. I decided to stay a whole week so I would have time to visit my friends. Continue reading →
Many of you already know this, but perhaps as a kind of secret. I’ve made a commitment to being fully self-expressive and I’ve come to realize that being secretive is actually causing more difficulties than the problems I am supposedly sparing people from. Also, if I act like there is a problem or I am uncomfortable with who I am, that puts a kind of energy out there that I don’t really want. Continue reading →
Yesterday I did something pretty brave. I came out of the closet, so to speak, in front of a room full of almost strangers.
And I was totally okay with it.
And the world didn’t end.
And if you haven’t been paying attention to the code words I use in the message tags, then now is the time to start.
I had the most amazing BBQ last night. I heard the legends of the Salt Lick, but I had never ventured out there. The Discovering Austin Meetup group was having a get together there, so I jumped at the chance.
It’s about 40 minutes southwest of Austin, a journey I took through dark, rolling hills. The restaurant itself is sprawled across two ranch-like buildings and a large outdoor picnic area.
The Salt Lick is a BYOB establishment. Let that sink in for a moment. When was the last time you went to a restaurant and they told you to please bring all the beer you want? I came with a six-pack of Sam Adams. Jay, the Meetup organizer, had a better idea: a rolling cooler stuffed with beer.
Once we had a table, our group ordered ribs, sausage, brisket and turkey, accompanied by piles of potatoes, beans, slaw and bread. For about $10 a head. The meat was slow roasted for 8 hours, ascending into some higher state of being. It was delicious!
Sometimes that XKCD guy is like a seer, peering into my life.
Click on the image for the larger view.
At long last, the new Alamo Drafthouse downtown is open! Tim League took over the old Ritz theater and completely renovated it to support the unique movie going experience that is the Alamo.
To celebrate, we got to see an advance screening of No Country for Old Men, which I will say right now is the Coen’s masterwork. And, by the way, Javier Bardem is utterly terrifying and I’d book passage to the moon if I knew his character was pursuing me.
Then Quentin Tarantino showed us some old Japanese monster movie from his collection: War of the Gargantuas. He was obviously a bit inebriated and he geeked out for quite some time before getting off the stage. He’s great.
For the first time in years I got excited about Halloween! Halloween in Austin is like Mardi Gras in NOLA. It is a huge, citywide party where all manner of debauchery and craziness ensues.
I put together this dark knight costume. No, not Batman or the kanniggit from Holy Grail. I got this chest armor, some spikey shoulder guards, these sweet skull gauntlets, and a badass 4-foot long sword. I also had this huge, matching skull shield, but it proved unwieldy to take everywhere.
I went to a fabulous party at the Enchanted Forest. Normally, this is a three-acre art space in the woods. Imagine a small Burning Man or Three-Sided Hole, but in the woods instead of the desert. But for Halloween, they transformed it into a Haunted Forest. It was BYOB, so you just show up with a cooler of beverages, pay the fee, and walk through this archway into another world.
It looked like a gigantic rave as designed by Neil Gaiman. Imagine hundreds of people in bizarre costumes, all dancing around immense trees while bands play in front of trippy projected light shows. There was a drum circle around a fire pit. There were lightsaber duels (and, briefly, lightsabers vs. a badass 4-foot long sword). There were crazy tents where people were doing awesome improv. It was, to summarize, the best Halloween party ever.
I got home at 7AM!
Oh, and I got to make out with a beautiful woman. 😉
I had issues that I had given up hope on get resolved during the Advanced Course.
We were doing an exercise where we examined an aspect of our life where things just weren’t working out. We cast our memory back to early instances where we noticed that we felt like something was wrong and we had changed our behavior to compensate. My area had to do with how I behave when I feel that I have failed/disappointed/hurt a woman in some way. Somehow this has become the worst thing in the world and I feel horrible if I let a woman down.
At first, my earliest memory had to do with the time I decided to make my mom happy by taking out the garbage unasked. She had always wanted me to do more chores around the house, so I thought this would be a nice thing to do. As it turns out, for whatever reason, she had left the garden hose in the bottom of the garbage can and it got taken away when the garbage truck came. She scolded me, telling me “That was a perfectly good garden hose you threw out!” So I learned that, despite my good intentions, I was never good enough for a woman to approve of me and I carried that with me in life.
But then, an earlier memory opened up like a forgotten door. There are whole years of my childhood memories that are just blank and dark. This was a memory before that time.
I was however old I was when I was in kindergarten (I have a problem with tracking time). I had been put in a small, dark shed next to one of the neighbor’s houses. I was sitting on a wooden chair, maybe tied to it. There was someone else in a chair next to me. A boy, I think. There were two older girls there, one of which was my neighbor. I remember being told to stay quiet as they peeked out the crack in the door. My neighbor’s face moved in towards mine, filling my vision and then everything went dark. I have no idea what happened. I just remember having a crush on her and thinking it was important to impress her and do what she wanted. From that point on, I was attracted to girls and women who had a facial resemblance to her. If they were older than me, that was even better. There is nothing wrong with this attraction. It simply is. But that experience was ground zero for my behavior towards all women in my life since then.
I had speculated for a long time about what may have generated certain relationship issues and challenges in my life. I say “challenges” to protect my family, but some of you know what I mean. This insight tied so many issues together, it was indeed a missing piece of the puzzle and I cannot express the kind of freedom I feel having faced it.