born live love die

After all these years, I think I understand something.  I have been wondering why I am not interested in the women I meet these days.  I meet them, they are attractive, they are available, but nothing happens.  We talk, compare notes, compare histories, and part.

When I was younger, wanting to be with someone was the reason I dated.  If the dating went well, I asked “Do you want to go to bed with me?”  At some point the question morphed into, “Do I want to go to sleep next to this person?”  When I found someone I trusted enough to sleep next to, I married her.

What I understand now is that the bar has been raised to “Do I want to wake up next to this woman?”  Do I want to be involved in everything she has in her life and want her to be involved in every part of my life.  I think the subconscious answer is “No”, an answer reached without cogitation.

In the last few weeks, I have been around a lot of married couples in social situations and it is clear that there are couples who are connected in positive ways and I envy them.  That is what I wanted when I got married the second, and last, time.  It didn’t happen.  Perfidy is an acid that can dissolve the tightest bonds.

Some of the women I meet in my daily life may be people that I could learn to trust enough to go to sleep next to and respect enough to want to wake up next to, but it hasn’t happened yet.

I have decided to a category of “Douchbags” for those people who deserve the title.  First up: some twits at Microsoft who filed for a patent for “sparklines”.  Sparklines are small graphics and the Wiki page describes them well.  These people at Microsoft filed for a patent on this:

• Samuel Chow Radakovitz, (Redmond, WA, US)
• Adam Michael Buerman,  (Bellevue, WA, US)
• Anupam Garg,  (Redmond, WA, US)
• Matthew John Androski,  (Bellevue, WA, US)
• Matthew Kevin Becker,  (Kirkland, WA, US)
• Brian S. Ruble,  (Bellevue, WA, US)

Sparklines were invented by Edward Tufte.  Like was posted on an MSDN blog:

For Excel 2010 we’ve implemented sparklines, “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”, as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence.  Sparklines help bring meaning and context to numbers being reported and, unlike a chart, are meant to be embedded into what they are describing.

Douchebags.

My daughter, Bookzilla, got that nickname for purposes of this blog because of her reading habits.  One day, she was sprawled across a chair and there was a pile of books to be read on once side and a pile of books she had already read on the other.  These were not difficult books to read.  The library has bunches of them, series books, aimed at juvenile readers.  I tried to read one once and it made my head hurt.  The books were lushly descriptive and dense blocks of prose marched the characters from one narrative plot point to another.  To quote Dana Stevens:

It’s this sense of place that elevates the Twilight films above the best-selling books by Stephenie Meyer, made up of impenetrable blocks of descriptive yet curiously featureless prose.

What she said.

I saw this and wanted to say “Dear God”.  It was disturbingly like a Saturday Night Live sketch, except that Al Franken is now a Senator.

This was a hearing of the Judiciary committee, and the yap-dog from the Hudson Institute comes back with cancer survivors.  Is it just me, or is it getting surreal in here?