Holy Toledo.

How did this happen? Was it because I left? It just seems like Micah is trying deliberately to make himself impossible to deal with.

-A few days ago, just before I came back from college, Micah got caught by the cops again, this time for buying weed. He's on house arrest and has more hours of community service to do. Meanwhile, he's under the strictest supervision he's yet had. Mom is staying home with him all the time. The thing is, she's in no state to deal with Micah. She's trying to recover from her thyroid issue, and her nerves are basically shot. So now Dad has started staying home too, as of this week. 

-Up to now, Micah has gone through three different schools. After Finneytown, he went to Wyoming, and then when he got in trouble he went to Dohn Community High School. That's where he stands right now. It's a sort of e-school, where he takes online courses and online quizzes. He goes to a building downtown some days. I'm not sure how it all works. He's upstairs working on quizzes now. 

-A while ago he was at church with Mom and found an iPod Touch on a table and brought it home. He says it wasn't theft, because he just found it on a table. Apparently, if you can't see the victim, or if the victim is forgetful, it's not theft, in Micah's conception. Mom found out about this, and was planning on returning the iPod to the church's lost and found or something, so the owner would be able to get it back. Just a few minutes ago, while I was downstairs here, Micah and Mom apparently got into a heated discussion of the iPod. At some point, Micah threw the thing on the floor and it broke.

-I don't know if he broke it because he was infuriated that Mom would give it back after he painstakingly stole it, or if he just threw it in a flare of anger and accidentally broke it. Either way, it was one more in a long line of inexplicable, infuriating things that he does. I can almost figure them out, but usually not quite. Mom and Dad are at a loss.

-Mom and Dad understand Micah on their own levels. Mom understands him as her son, who she loves more than anything, but who is going through some sort of hard time. For Mom, Micah is someone who takes all the love she gives him and then in return just goes and gets in more trouble with the law and does things like throwing the iPod. Dad understands Micah as a screw-up, who, no matter what, always seems to make the worst decision, without regard for the consequences. I try to understand Micah as he understands himself. I haven't figured it out yet, though. As near as I can tell, it's something like this:

-I should be allowed to do what I want to do, because this is my body and my self. The law and my parents shouldn't have any power over me, because they're not me. I also like hanging out with my friends, but since my friends all think like me about their rights, no one likes them—or me—and everyone tries to keep me from hanging around with them. I've screwed up a lot, but that doesn't invalidate my rights. But because I've screwed up, everyone seems to be against me. And I need to make them respect me, so in order to get back to their level, I have to assert myself and be really independent. When I do my own thing and it works for me, people will respect me.

-I'm still working on how Micah thinks of himself. I'll try and figure him out this summer. In addition to all the other stuff I'll be doing. I wish I had two summers for all the stuff I'm doing.

P.S.: We have kittens here! Awwwwwww… kittens.

This weblog is about cellular telephones

Unto now, I've been happy not to have a cell phone. My rationale for this was that cell phones are annoying and cost money that I could spend better somewhere else. Also, I liked being unreachable—for example, if I were out walking in the woods, I wouldn't want to talk with someone on my cell phone, because that would ruin the experience. I also always get annoyed when I'm talking with someone and they get a phone call, and talk to that person instead of me, who am currently with them in real life, and I didn't want to be the guy who does that. And after all, before the 1990s people got along just fine for centuries going to college without cell phones, so I should be able to just as well, especially since I've got an advantage over all those previous decades in that I can use email too.  But I've been coming to realize that it doesn't work quite like that. It's hard to get along without a cell phone because society has morphed to make them the first means of communication that people think about.

-For example, it seems—at least in college—that people don't honor meeting times anymore, or even think about meetings in terms of a certain time, especially if it's just two people meeting. They just ask your cell phone number, and say they'll call you and figure out when to meet. No one sets a time for hanging out anymore, as I imagine they did before cell phones. They just call someone and say, "Wanna hang out?" When I tell someone I don't have a cell phone, it throws them off, and I get the feeling when I'm setting up a meeting time with them that it's something they haven't done in a while. And since people always have the luxury of changing a meeting time, they probably don't think as hard about whether they might have some sort of conflict. It's all well and good except when they're going to meet with me, and then realize they're going to be late, and so I stand there for several extra minutes, puzzled and wondering whether I misremembered the time. 

-It also seems like, now that there are cell phones, people don't use other forms of communication with quite as much dedication. Over the last few days I've been trying to get in touch with Eric a lot to figure out when we can do another of our awesome exploits, but I've been writing to him with email, and out of probably six or seven emails that I've sent him, all of them asking for a reply, he's replied once. I just have to find him face to face, and he doesn't go to any meals, so it's caused me to have to delay our exploit. To sum up, it's annoying not to have a cell phone, because everyone else has one and it seems like it's the only way they talk to each other anymore.

-So I guess this summer I'll get one. Probably a cheap one, without a lot of features that I won't use, and probably a pay-as-you-go thing. I'm not real happy about it, but I've concluded that people just can't deal with it these days if I don't have one.

-It's been finals, so there's not a lot to say—I've been writing papers and stuff. I've also been (as you've seen) planning an exploit, but that's for another entry. I'm coming home this Friday, approximately. Then I'll do fun stuff until it's time for camp on the 11th. Then I'll do camp, which will be all sorts of fun, and then I'll drive to Duluth and do Crowduck, and then I'll work on fonts and do other fun stuff again. Wow, I just condensed my summer into one sentence. It'll be way more exciting once I get to it. I've been hanging out with people a lot, including Elissa, since it'd be good for us to get to know each other before we start living together. She has lots of plants. And likes tea a lot. I told her I have a feeling she's going to donate a lot of tea to me next year. She said probably so, and to the rest of EcoHouse too. I have this thing about tea: I drink a fair amount of it, but I've only once paid directly for a teabag, and that was last summer. Instead I get it from the dining hall; or from a stash in the building where Larissa's office is; or from Bob's when bags of it get separated from their box, which makes them unidentifiable and thus unsaleable; or from catered events; or from friends. Next year I expect I'll get an even better variety of tea, and still never pay for any.

-Oh, a couple weeks ago, I was snooping through file cabinets in Bob's, and in one of them I found a big Quaker Oatmeal canister full of CDs. I ripped a bunch of them onto my computer. Got some Radiohead, Barenaked Ladies, Die Toten Hosen (which is German for The Dead Pants), System of a Down, and some bands with interesting names: The Afghan Whigs and The Alphabetical Order. I like that around here you can just happen upon about a hundred hours of music. Too bad a lot of it was scratched beyond repair.

Failures (a prelude)

Watch for the sequel to this post, entitled "Successes", coming out sometime in the next year or so.
I've been a bit bummed, because for the second straight year I've abjectly failed to find a girlfriend. Luckily, I've also figured out why I haven't been any good at it in the past, and I've changed what I needed to change.
-Last year, the reason I failed was pretty clear: I made the internet my home. I'm sure I've written about this before, but the problem was that instead of doing something after my classes ended, I would go into my room and read crap on the internet until I had to do homework. Basically, if I wasn't in class or doing something else that I had to d, I was very likely reading the internet. It was a problem. As I went through the year, I kept discovering the problem again, and writing in my journal that today was the day I would stop spending so much time on the internet. But I would always end up there, because I hadn't realized two things. One was that I needed something to replace the internet with if I hoped to stop using it, and the other was that it was an addiction. I realized the fist of these things toward the beginning of this year, when I resolved to spend more time with real people instead of the internet. Sometime around winter break I instituted a one-hour-a-day policy for myself, wherein I was only allowed one hour per day for internet, except emails and blogging and chatting with Mom & Dad, because I kind of had to do those things. If I went over, I took the extra time out of the next day's hour. It worked pretty well. It's taken me until recently to actually call it an addiction. I noticed that I was consistently going over my hour, and I had built up a backlog of about two weeks where I should be free of the internet. So a couple days ago I decided that for the rest of the school year I wouldn't use the internet, except to check emails, write the occasional blog, and chat with Mom & Dad if one of them caught me while I was online. The first two or three days of this have worked so well that I think I'm going to make it permanent. I'm just going to accept that I can't use the internet for just a little while. It always snowballs into longer than it should, no matter what I try to do, and it's been interfering with how much time I have to dedicate to real-life pursuits. Which is why it's an addiction, and which brings us back to the matter of girlfriends.
-This year my failure was a combination of things. One thing was that I spent the whole year barking up two trees that were both the wrong one. C. worked at camp with me, and so I naturally assumed that since we both went to Grinnell and worked at Camp Manito-wish, we must have a good deal in common. Now, the other thing that came into play was that I hadn't renounced the internet yet, or replaced it effectively with something in real life—I hadn't joined any student groups or anything, nor did I hang out with friends except at the dining hall, and if I came home and successfully made myself leave the computer closed, I would just end up doing something else in my room to pass time until bed, like reading my journal or thinking about napping. That meant that I didn't hang out with C., or people who knew her, much; and so I didn't realize until after I'd spent a whole semester getting to know her that she was, as my roommate put it, "a party girl". She's nice, but not right for me.
-At about the same time, I was coming to know M., who's very outgoing and excellently strange and doesn't plan her life around parties. So after winter break I started trying to get closer to her. But because I wasn't hanging out with her, or her friends, very much, it took me a long time to catch her at a time when I could find out what her thoughts were on romance in the near future. As it turned out, she wasn't looking for someone when I was looking for her. But because I still hadn't gotten out of my fairly small, rather male circle of friends that I've been eating most meals with since I got here, I couldn't think of anyone but M., and she had suggested that she might change her mind in the near future, so I just kept thinking of her.
-Finally, though, I've started hanging around with more people, sitting at more than just one table, and above all I've given up the internet and plan to replace it with real life. I talked with M. a couple days ago, because I had never spilled all these relationship woes to anyone before. She agreed with my thoughts on why I got nowhere these two years. Then I told her I was getting to know more people, and was starting to form vague ideas of where to go now that M. herself was taken again. She asked who might be on my list of candidates. I told her a name, and it turned out we both thought the girl I'd mentioned could perhaps be a good person to go for. So now I have a direction, even though it's a vague one, because I know fairly little about this girl yet. However, I also know I'm not going to just sit around and hope something happens for me. I'm going to make it happen.

-Other stuff: I've been customizing my laptop. I now have a keyboard that allows me to type —em dashes— and –en dashes– and ¼frac½tions¾ without even flinching, and I can also go all föréìĝñ on a moment's notice. And I've bought an upgrade to my font-making program. And, I'm finally doing something I should've done long ago: I'm consolidating my computers, so I don't have to take my big unwieldy (and recently, very slow) tower back and forth between here and Ohio all the time. I'll keep it around in Ohio, but mainly for historical purposes and as a backup files repository. Oh, and I've been (poorly so far) making moccasin-sewing string out of sinew, and working on my bow, and other fun stuff. Such as hanging out. I did a good deal of that yesterday, and some more today. I'm becoming happier. And that makes me happy… so basically, life is looking nice.