motherboards

On a whim, in a stupor induced by headcold, finding myself thinking clearly but simply, even more distracted than usual, I got interested in electronics.

It started with the annual winter yen to build a Theremin. Followed closely by the thought: how hard could it be?

Theremins are the electronic instruments from 1950s horror movies, an electronic, hands-free instrument that produces sound based on the performers hands interacting with electrical fields surrounding antennas.

Read about its basic operating principles per wikipedia.

It's one thing to know about Theremins, it's another to know how they work. I want to build one; I want to know how they work.

Which requires a serious dredging up of lost knowledge regarding electronics.

Actually, I never knew much about electronics, though I did well on the EM section of the Physics AP exam.

It's been that long.

Granted we built a robot, but I never got a good understanding of circuits beyond basic principles and simple schematics. A Theremin, it turns out, is pretty advanced.

So I decided to start small. A visit to American Science and Surplus (a wonderland of strangeness) resulted in me being the proud owner of a "My First Strobe Kit", a DIY electronic circuit that requires soldering ("sottering") and whatnot.

The more I think about electronic circuits, the more I don't understand them. How does information flow through them? I'm learning, of course, about resistors, potentiometers, capacitors, and whatever else. Lots to keep track of.

So I started with a problem, how to build a Theremin, which turned out to be too complicated, so I broke it down, and broke it down, and broke it down. Electricity is still pretty complicated, but with this Strobe kit I can at least start learning by doing.

[As if I needed another hobby.]

But maybe this is just a rhythm of thought, a wavelength, that I've been fostering, against all odds: trying to figure out how things work. It begins with identifying the problem and ends with breaking it down into the simplest components. Whether or not I put the parts back together remains to be seen.

Deconstruct first; reconstruct second.

Through this process, I've realized that I don't actually believe in anything. Or the opposite. I believe in too many things, contradictory things, that render them un-possible.

["Me fail English? That's unpossible!"]

For instance, it doesn't happen too often, but there was at least one time on the bike tour that someone asked me about my religious beliefs. I don't know how, but I realized that I both believe in God and in the death of God. I both believe in reincarnation and don't. I both believe in good and evil and don't.

It's like, when I get down to the electronic circuit of my mind, there's all these switches that allow both 1's and 0's.

Which coincides with this book that I'm reading: Erring by Mark C Taylor.

"There is a large, and I believe growing, number of people who find themselves in the middle of such extremes. Suspended between the loss of old certainties and the discovery of new beliefs, these marginal people constantly live on the border that both joins and separates belief and unbelief. They look but do not find, search but do not discover."

So I'm not so unusual. There's always consolation in that.

throwing things into other things

I've been storing up these stories, awaiting the completion of a trilogy. The other day, completion; here they are.

1) It's no secret that I go to Kuma's Corner maybe once a week. Meat, it's good. It's maybe a secret that I used to be vegetarian and, for this reason, have little sympathy for veggies, thinking that that was a phase that I went through and thought better of. Glad I did it though.

Generally what happens is this: I eat something for dinner - neither a mere snack nor a feast - and feel pretty satisfied until one or another of my roommates sends me a text: "House meeting." This, of course, means Kuma's, and it's almost always after 10:30, sometimes 11.

If we happen to be in person, one of us will say: "Yeah, I could wrap my dick around that" which somehow translates to "I'm in." [I'm in = I'm down = I'm up for it... etc.]

So one time a week or two ago, the crazy roommate and the aborted-baby-daddy suddenly said they were going, but I had just opened a beer. Dilemma! I was on the ram's horns, wanting to sit and finish my beer (waste not!) but also wanting to go get some meat.

Solution: bike with beer.

It's not legal per se, but it's not exactly immoral. I draw the line at immoral. Or at least just a little past.

So I'm biking one-handed on the fixie, left hand poised on the brake [safety first!], when, about half-way there [it's a 7-minute ride], I finish my beer and feel an immediate desire to dispose of the empty bottle. I'm feeling fractious and have an urge to just throw it, devil may care. But then, golden opportunity: a dumpster on the other side of the street. Almost like a reflex, I hook-shotted the bottle in an arc over my head.

Draino.

It couldn't have gone any better.

2) My crazy roommate had gone to Florida and come back, was forbidden to come back to the house, and was spending the weekend in a padded room. [At least that's how I picture it.] The day after her institutionalization was C's birthday party. He had a keg of good beer [that still has some left in it] and a barrel for a hobo-fire.

So, now that we all know what a hobo fire is, let's carry on. [We didn't use a blowtorch to make the holes, rather a drill with some hole-cutting attachment.]

Picture this. The fire is burning and people are showing up. I showed up after a concert that was pretty terrible and had drank 2 G&Ts at the post-concert reception. [I ended up way drunker that night and ended up missing my cross race the next day.]

So things are happening, I turn on the music, it's a party.

At some point, we were going to burn this small wicker ottoman that was taking up space in the living room. In honor of clean-space-clean-mind, I'm getting rid of the random junk in our apartment.

Somehow, I decided to try to throw it from the balcony [2nd floor] into the hobo fire 30 feet away. It seemed unlikely to work, but the greatest rewards come from the highest risk. And the best risks are the one you're not attached to (or are ignoring).

First throw! Miss. Just wide. No can, no fire. Close but no cigar.

C throws the ottoman back up to me (wicker is pretty light), I catch (amazing!), and throw again.

No real thought, just a vague amount of preparation.

Draino. Right in. There were only a few orientations that the stool could even fit into the can, and it happened to find it just as it went in.

Someone came up to me afterwards and said: "If that was on Youtube I'd think it a fake."

Not a fake, just being awesome.

3) On Sunday, my chef-friend and I are driving to a bike race (I've learned my lesson about drinking too much the night before and have made it to *all* subsequent races), and we stop at a gas station for some 5-hour energy and coffee.

But I have this cup from last week still in the cup holder and don't have room for my coffee. What to do?! Dilemma!

So I look around for a drive-up trash can. Nothing.

I find one right in front of the cashier but that's 4 feet away from the curb. I drive up and ask him: "think I can make it?" He laughs, I aim and shoot...

Way way too high, like 3 feet. Hit the window right by the cashier and sort of exploded with melted ice from last week's post-race soda. Missed the can.

So I take my foot off the clutch [LURCH, stall...] and go throw it away. Total fail. The lurch even spilled my coffee [a little] in the car.

Then driving away, he's still laughing in fits, I'm trying to drink the coffee. He gets me laughing right as I'm drinking, and I inhale it. Really. Inhale. Not just choking on it, the coffee enters my lungs and I feel this strange sensation like I'm freebasing coffee, the caffeine entering straight into my blood stream.

I managed to cough most of it out before the race and like to think that it was to blame for my 8th place finish in the race. Not too shabby but would have liked to do better.

Trilogy complete.

coincidences

I think I am done talking about the ex-roommate. Then again, that's exactly what I thought about a million times already and, really, after the thousand-and-first time, I started writing about it. So, sometimes excess is for the win.

We had 2 girls over last week to fill the vacancy. One of my roommates had said "No girls." after the last one, but we assured him that not all women are prone to insanity.

Neither of the 2 who came over seemed borderline anything, and we approved of both. The girl interested in a long-term living situation flaked out, and we went with the short-term Scottish girl who's in town for a semester at the SAIC, something about sculptural installation art.

When she was by the house, she told us a sob story about why she had to leave her current place on short notice and under duress. She was subletting from some folks, had given them a security deposit, and they went to Détroit. Then, mid-October, the landlord comes by and says that the folks who skipped town owed a month or two in rent. For some reason, this poor Scottish lass was on the hook for it. So she was being asked to leave. Shitty sitch.

W heard all this and asked for clarification: where exactly was this house she was living in?

Turns out, he knows the people who live on the other half of the house - good friends of his - and he knew more about the sitch.

One of the people who left earned the nickname "The Step-Shitter" due to an unfortunate mess that he left on the steps leading up to the house, probably while on drugs.

That was another thing W heard about the folks who left: junkies. So somehow, through the magic of the internet, this girl ended up at our place.

W thought all this was very funny when he met her, for, he too was on drugs, though nothing so deleterious as heroin. Just hard enough, however, for him to bring up, multiple times, how insanely coincidental it was that she lived with the step-shitter.

So now she lives with us and made dinner last night. Real food! Yum.

In other news, I had a SLEEP burger the other day. Fuck yeah.

finding is the new losing

New day, same topic.

I thought we had moved on. I would have thought the hospital would have figured out her brand of crazy and tweezed it out.

No communication for a while, followed by a rumor that she had stopped by the house. Something about being drunk and talking to C.

Sure enough, it happened. But no one seemed to want to talk about it.

Then I get a text from my friend, the one who set her up with us. (That is, her ex.)

"Did she leave her phone at her house?"

I told him I was sure she didn't come in the house and haven't seen it.

More texts, more insistent, and it comes out that she was, in fact, at our place, inside, and had possibly left her phone.

And by "left", I mean "threw".

No visual proof, but it sounds like, after a heated confrontation with C, she flipped out and, on the way out, threw her phone somewhere in our apartment.

In order to have a reason to come back?

I was set to ignore it, not caring what happens. I have sympathy for everyone - up to a point. Once it's gone, it takes a long time to grow back. Her account is bankrupt.

But today, I was tearing apart the living room in search of her phone.

And then I got into it, moving couches, dusting, wiping the floor in the dark corner where clutter accumulates, and rearranging the furniture situation.

It was, in fact, on my list to do some cleaning/organizing today. I didn't get to my space, but made a good dent in the common space.

And then, after having forgotten the original impetus for cleaning, her phone turned up. The rumors and theories were true: she was over and planted her phone in a fit of drunken rage at random in our house.

She's burned through her allotment of sympathy and now is accruing ire. I'll get her her phone back but she'd better stay away while we forget (and block out) her very existence.

A microcosm of a small world

We had 2 potential roommates come over yesterday to drink some keg beer (left over from C's b-day rampage) and hang out on the back porch as the lightning flashed through the drizzle.

Double-Dub was skeptical, still scarred from our last roommate experience: "No girls." Not that we're not scarred in some way, but Cee and I agree that a stable girl would bring balance to the house-force.

The first knew a friend of Dub's, a fact apparently disclosed as I was letting the second one in. A little overlap makes for a little awkwardness, a good test of how borderline-psycho they are.

The second lived over by Doble-Dub's friends, a fact discovered by Sea; he tried to ask if she'd seen them around, describing them as "guys who wear black shirts a lot. Not scary, just like punks."

She was moving because the people she was subletting with skipped town owing the landlord rent, having taken a security deposit from her. Poor lass, she is only in Chicago for a semester at the SAIC before returning to Glasgow to install more site-specific art.

She also describes her current place as rat-infested, as in there are many rats in the yard when she gets home and scares them off. But not all the way off.

Dub comes back out, probably high on something or another, and puts two and two together; she lives on the other side of the house his friends live in.

He knows about the drama with the absconders - apparently one of them took a shit on the stairs, a fact that gets repeated a lot - and offers his sympathy: sounds like a bad-bad situation.

[Apparently the shit incident was induced by heroin?]

So apparently, while I still don't know anyone personally who does heroin, I know people who know people who used to live next to people who do it. Close enough.

Dub even called it a shitshow without realizing how literally true that figure of speech was. And then went on to bring up how crazy it was that she was living there. And that he knew the situation. And how bad the situation was. And how he doesn't blame her for getting out.

Maybe to our place...?

[Sidenote: anyone know where "Shitshow" first appeared?]

Small world.

Unlock the Door

The ex-roommate has been in the hospital all weekend. The whole situation has been a lesson in "just-when-you-think-it's-over-it's-not" and "just-when-you-are-resigned-to-it-going-on-forever-it-may-just-come-to-an-end."

Either way, a total chick-flick-turned-horror-movie.

So after she spent almost 12 hours in her hometown, full of people who would presumably be able to take care of her but didn't, she came back to Chicago, was refused re-entry to the house and wandered the streets. Finally, other roommate picked her up at a neutral meeting place and she acquiesced to being hospitalized.

My mom read the saga and sent two very nice emails of support, the latter describing the ex-roomie's condition and giving it a name: Borderline Personality Disorder.

Really, I think it should be called Borderline Psychosis, and it seems that that's the origin of the label.

According to wikipedia, it involves deep and variable moods, black/white thinking, and the propensity to idealize and demonize (others, etc.).

Something that always bothered me about the former roommate was her black/white thinking. I always attributed it to her living a relatively sheltered life, primarily experiencing life through her Orlando-colored sunglasses.

Maybe living in Chicago shattered her idealized vision of the world.

In the last conversation that I had with her (possibly forever), she admitted, finally, that one of the big reasons why she moved to Chicago was to pursue a relationship with her ex, my co-worker who set us up on this blind-roommate-date in the first place.

She describes them as having a long-distance relationship for the 2 years that he's been her. Unclear how long they'd been together before. She complained that he only called her 22 times in 2 years. I think that was the number; she seemed pretty clear on exactly how many.

He says he clearly broke it off when he left Florida.

Turns out, she had this idealized notion of him and was unwilling/unable to let go of it.

I feel like I did that once, went a little crazy. But only a little.

Yet another proof that reality is determined by what you are able/willing to believe. What you believe is truth. Even if you can *think* something different, you are limited by your ability to *believe*.

"Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said 'one can't believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Clearly we are able to believe impossible things, unreal things: that the Earth is flat, that Jesus rose from the dead, and especially love.

rom com / drama / horror

Somehow the last few months have encompassed every genre. And it was all because of one person, admittedly with a flair for the dramatic, an actor.

We were looking for a roommate, so I posted a note on facebook. Within an hour, I was talking to a girl, the friend of a co-worker (really, the ex of a friend) moving to Chicago to pursue improv comedy.

Yes, improv comedians can have a lot of energy; yes, she was only 22; yes, she was from Florida and had never seen snow. And, sight unseen, we approved her. It seemed to work out too well, like the stars had aligned. And when I say "we" approved her, I mean I did - along with the outmoving girl.

The Princess moved in - and I don't mean princess in the entitled way, rather Disney - and we started off in our little romantic comedy.

Not that there was real romance, but there was always the threat lurking under the surface. She's a flirt. She likes people to like her, in need of constant approval. A typical actor. She lies for a living.

She spent her days working retail, her nights gigging or taking improv classes. And somehow still had time to spend with her ex, maybe in an effort to manipulate him back in love with her.

When that fell apart, the wheels started to come off the bus. And yet, finally, with all the wheels off, the bus kept hurtling through space, losing pieces until it was just the driver's seat on fire, sliding down the road, no driver to be seen.

It came out that she had body image issues. I had never really met anyone with an eating disorder, so that was novel for me. And confusing. And I really didn't want to understand what was going through her head. To me, it was so wrong, that I didn't want to understand how someone could do it. It's one of those topics that doesn't get explored too much in literature, leaving us unprepared. We have put ourselves in the minds of the killers, the victims, the lovers, and all the rest. Even suicide victims. But this, this is the silent soul stealer that remains totally incomprehensible.

And she drank. But she didn't have a problem. But it was a problem.

She could go a couple nights without drinking, but it was clearly her method of dealing with whatever was going wrong, and when she hit the sauce, she hit it hard. Sometimes for days.

Like a pendulum filmed in reverse, she oscillated slowly at first but got wilder and wilder. Her mom was bi-polar. I don't know if she, herself, was quite there, but she was definitely bi-curious-polar.

It's amazing what people can get away with if they're attractive and confident.

She started sleeping with people in the house. Another coping mechanism? It's a lot easier for a woman to seduce a man. That statement is so cliché that I'm just going to leave it. Masochism.

At some point, the sex stopped between her and one of the guys. Or rather, he tried to stop it. A few days later, there was a dramatic falling out between them at the bar. And the next day she was preggers.

Or was she?

I'm guessing she was, which would make the visit to Planned Parenthood less than a charade. If there's anyone in this world who should not be bringing a child into this world, it's this girl. Her mom had 6 still-borns; nature was trying to tell this gene pool that breeding is not the best idea.

The oscillations became wilder.

After the supposed abortion, there was a 3-day period where she was so drunk that she didn't even feel drunk any more. Mostly hard stuff, a couple 6-packs of Mothership Wit (per day).

And throughout all this, she kept promising to leave. Kept going back and forth. It felt almost tidal: a rush of hope that this saga would end, a crash of disappointment that it kept dragging on.

All I ever wanted was my rug back. And by rug, I mean stability.

It takes a lot of energy to be around someone who is so volatile. It prevents you from living your own life. And she had collapsed so far into the black hole of a soul that it was getting harder to escape her gravity. She, herself, had no idea how much her actions were affecting those around her. [Then again, do any of us?]

It was getting to the point that we were going to have to ask her to leave. Her preemptive promises to vacate were only prolonging the inevitable. She had a few moments of clarity, during which I was tempted to tell her that she could stay or go, but that she'd have to leave the booze at the door.

On Wednesday, I came home to cops and firefighters in the apartment waiting for her to get her things. She apparently was drunk (er than usual) and was talking about suicide. I thought this would get her the help she needed.

But, like a professional liar, she convinced them she was sane and was back home in 3 hours. [It took her that long to walk home from the hospital. No phone and no money meant that she walked back in the rain.]

The next day, more lucidity. And then, out of nowhere: "help me to go back to Florida." Denial is the hardest hurdle; once over it, we weren't about to waste any time.

Finally, put to rest, left behind us.

She sent some optimistic texts when she got back to Florida. And I closed that door in my head. Closure.

Until the next morning. Roommate got some 3am texts: "Sleeping on the floor in a pile of cat hair." "The haven that I thought I had isn't here." "I'm coming back to Chicago, be there by noon."

We put her on the first flight out of Chicago, and she took the first flight back in.

Or did she?

Was this a hoax? Or, did she ever leave?

Were the texts coming from IN the apartment?!?!?

Our best guess is no. That she really made it to Florida. Panicked. Couldn't find friends willing to put her up (let alone family) and thought she was still welcome in Chicago.

She thought wrong.

We sent her some texts to indicate that this was a bad idea, but she had either turned her phone off or was really on a plane. Got some texts at 9:30. First plane from Orlando to Chicago was at 7:30, landed at 9:20.

Maybe she only lies about the small stuff. The big stuff is really too crazy to make up. No one would ever believe it.

And here we are, wondering what comes next. The doors are locked, and we have her keys.