Cogs can think.

Speaking of good comedy, let’s talk That ’70s Show. The best Jacky & Hyde scenes (ignore the crappy music, not part of the show).

“I’m not saying it back!” The best scene in the entire series. Emotional, intense, extremely funny, and well acted. I love this. Comedy milestone.

Still the best piece of comedy ever written.

This stuff is absolutely unbeatable.

Some short notes:

My mother was operated on again last Thursday. Not too long ago, she had a complicated breast reconstruction surgery done, but one of the breasts actually got infected, and needed to be removed again in a rush surgery. This week they fixed the situation, so let’s hope she doesn’t get an infection this time. Everything went well, and she will be discharged from the hospital tomorrow.

I introduced Renate and Bart to Battlestar Galactica (starting with the miniseries, of course), and they seem to like it so far. Bart is into sci-fi and space stuff, so no surprises there. Renate, on the other hand, isn’t a particular fan, so it’s nice to see her liking it. Let’s hope they’ll like the series as well.

On a very related note, Nicki Clyne agreed to an interview for OSNews. Nicki Clyne portrays Cally Henderson in Battlestar Galactica, and the first moment I saw her in the miniseries I had a sensation of wait-I-know-her-load-up-imdb, and as it turned out, she played a 5-line role in Dead Like Me (“DON’T tell your mom…”). I’m really looking forward to the interview - too bad it can’t be a face-to-face one (seeing we live on opposite sides of that thing filled with water, and I can’t swim), but hey, you can’t have the whole world. We’ll make do.

It’s 2am here, I demand a shower and a bed.

Libertarians?

No offense, but, uhm, total idiots.

Show me one example of a libertarian governmental model working out better for citizens than a welfare model as seen in most European countries. Just one.

My parents bought their first mp3 player today. They bought the new iPod Nano. I was - obviously - tasked with buying it for them, setting it up, and uploading the first few CDs. This is my first hands-on experience with an iPod that lasted longer than 3 seconds (I’m the world’s worst geek). Two things.

1. You need an iTunes account for downloading artwork. If you don’t have an account, and don’t want one either, like my parents or myself, you need to rely on 3rd party applications to draw artwork from Amazon’s database. Hardly what I call user friendly.
2. I set the Nano up at my own house, using my PowerBook (I don’t wish to infect my Windows box with Apple’s crappy Windows software). Later today, I visited my parents’ to give them the Nano and give them some instructions on how to add albums to iTunes and the Nano - and things went tits up. Apparently, an iPod first hooked up to a Mac cannot be connected to a Windows machine (what my parents have) afterwards. As a geek, I know this is a HFS+ issue, but what about all those normal users Apple always says it targets? Why couldn’t they just format the device with fat32 in the first place, like all other players do? Or, better yet, why don’t they include an HFS+ driver in iTunes:Windows? Why don’t they warn me upon first hooking the Nano up? Give me a bloody choice at least? Now I had to reset the Nano, loosing all the work I had already done!

First iPod experience: EPIC FAIL.

It was a rather cold January night, about 4.5 years ago. I had been tossing and turning in my bed for about one or two hours now, and I already gave up on ever getting some decent sleep done that night. My mind was stuck on something. Something was wreaking havoc through my brain. Tapes, coming out of ears, sticking me to the roof of the attic room that I slept in back at my parents’ house. I decided to do something that I usually did when I get stuck.

I jumped out of bed, put on some jeans and a shirt, and walked downstairs, through the kitchen, the storage rooms, and into my dad’s office. It was around 1am, he was sitting behind his computer, probably working on some poetry or one of his longer stories.

Dad, what if I don’t like her? What if those feelings that I think I have are nothing but an illusion? What if I’m interpreting this all wrong? It came out a little blunt.

Son, you never really know, my father reassures me. It’s nothing to worry about, we all go through this at one point in our lives. It’s perfectly normal.

I looked down. I started to explain. But I feel guilty, I say, what if she loves me more than I do her? What if I’m just doing all this for the sake of doing all this? Just to be able to say, look, I love that girl - just to be able to say it?

So what? My dad replies matter-of-factly. That’s nothing to feel ashamed about. We all want to pretend we feel something even when we don’t when we’re as young as you are. It’s called life. Learning to understand your feelings is more or less what life is all about. And when you die? You still won’t know for sure that all those things you felt were actually really true.

—

A few days later, it ended in tears, followed by a few big bangs. I did what I usually do whenever I don’t have a clue as to what the hell is going on: I blame someone else. Pointing fingers is something I happen to be really good at, you see. Pointing fingers moves the spotlight away from yourself, forcing it to focus on someone else. But it wasn’t solely her fault, as the people around me said. She was a weird piece of human, that’s for sure. An odd-ball, different than any other girl on this planet, but she wasn’t wrong. She was sweet, intelligent, and dealing with some really difficult things in her life - just as I was (and still am) dealing with some really difficult things in my life. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong people, wrong everything.

Oh, and she started dating someone else, which, oddly, kind of didn’t help the situation. And to make matters worse, I wasn’t in love with her at all, just as I feared. It took me a little while to find out, but there was another girl in my life. A girl that made me forget everything that I had learnt up until then.

—

I’m not an easy person to live with. Sure, on the outside, when you first meet me, I’m all easy going like The Beach Boys on Sunset Blvd, but when you want to get too close, when you want to know more than just the 5-10% that’s stuck to my outer self, you’re in for a hard time. I don’t let people in easily. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that my past left such a big mark on me, and seriously damaged the trust that I should put in those close to me, that I’d much rather build a little wall around me, with just one door that opens from the inside only. No windows.

That is, until I met her - and more importantly, her. The former fixed the door so it could open from the outside too, and the latter put in windows, and removed the lock from the door - in fact, she tore down the door, put a big sign on the doormat that reads “Welcome!” in Trebuchet MS, brought in a postcard with a ‘thank-you-for-being-you’ note, and then cosily put a comfortable chair inside of it for her to sit on whenever she felt like it.

The first girl? She was the one who I mentioned earlier, the other girl, the girl who I was actually in love with. This wonderful woman made me realise that I had so much more to offer than I gave myself credit for, she tapped into that sense of playful arrogance and pride that was lurking deep within me. She opened my door, and allowed me to be me for the first time. And I loved her so much for it.

But I didn’t want to know. My friendship with her was so close, and it meant so much to me, that I didn’t even realise that I was actually in love with her. The girl who I talked about with my father? She was a surrogate. And a surrogate that couldn’t even hold a candle to the real deal, no matter how hard I forced myself into believing that she could.

It would take me years to figure all this out. Surrogate girl didn’t become surrogate girl until only about two years ago. My friendship with non-surrogate girl (blogging without names sucks major ass) watered down rather quickly when she changed schools. I’ve been effective at pushing her away, and she has been effective in accepting that.

By the way, she never knew. And still doesn’t.

—

The tearing-down-doors-and-bringing-in-postcards-and-comfortable-chairs girl? That’s a completely different story, and she actually has a name.

—

I look back upon the last five years as somewhat of a revelation. I’ve changed dramatically - for the better, I think. I’ve become more open, outgoing, and I actually learned a whole new word, a word that opened so many doors for me, a word that made me realise there’s more to life than doing what people ask of you: no.

Still, I’ve got a long road to go, a lot of things to learn. But like my dad said - learning what your feelings mean is more or less what life is all about. More than ever, I now understand what he meant when he said that. I’ve got so many years of learning and mistrusting my feelings ahead of me, and you know what? I’m looking forward to it now more than ever. What’s happened has happened, what’s coming is already on its way, with a role for me to play.

I’m me, I’m open to suggestions, but I can’t guarantee I’ll take them into serious consideration. That’s life, peanut!

Just an ordinary Tuesday, it would seem. That’s how it felt when I got out of bed in any case.

But oh no.

I finally received word from the municipal government here, concerning my request for a tax break concerning the sewage and pollution tax (colloquially: “crap tax”) - which is 300 EUR each year. For people with a low income - like me - there’s a system in place where you send in data on your income, proving that you are, effectively, not rich enough, and then you don’t have to pay the 300 EUR. Last year, I got this tax break, seeing I’m just a student, and don’t make an awful lot of money.

This year, nothing changed concerning my financial status - in fact, it got a little worse. My salary didn’t go up, but just about every expenditure went up - rent, property and health insurance, petrol, they all got more expensive. My student loan, which I receive every month, went down - this is a loan from the government, so technically, it’s not even income. I have to pay that back in the coming 25 years.

So, confident this year I’d de eligible for the same tax break, I filled in all the forms, sent them my data, and waited. For a long time. And a few months ago, they replied - and denied my request, saying my income was too high. I was baffled. Nothing had changed - in fact, my financial situation had deteriorated! I don’t believe in free rides, but this just wasn’t fair.

So I filed an official complaint. I sent a polite but firm letter back to the municipal government, asking for a clarification. How was it possible that despite my financial situation getting slightly worse, I was now not eligible for the tax break? On what basis had this decision been made?

The answer came today. They acknowledged that my situation had gotten slightly worse, but they still denied my request. You see, my income may have gotten worse - but they changed the way they calculate the total income of students. Basically, what they do differently now is that they add the student loan to the total income. Obviously, nobody announced this change, so I couldn’t have known.

What a total piece of horse shit. So, everyone who has a loan in this country should add that loan to his or her total income? What kind of bullcrap is that?

Back at the store where I work, we call this creative bookkeeping. We have two registers, and every now and then, at the end of the day, the numbers don’t add up. One of the registers may have a surplus or a loss, which is not really desirable. However, sometimes, one of the registers has too much money, and the other too little. Technically, we should locate the source of both discrepancies and fix them - but hey, sometimes it’s Friday evening, 21:00, and we just want to go home. So we do some creative bookkeeping, and fix the issues by taking money from one register, and putting it in the other. Technically not a solution to the problem, but nobody is none the wiser. Problem “fixed”.

This kind of feels like the same thing. I’m fairly sure the municipal government had a shortage in one part of the balance sheet, and is now trying to fix it by taking money from somewhere else. Whether or not this is a nationwide issue remains to be seen - municipalities have a lot of freedom when it comes to local taxes.

I truly feel fucked in the ass, and I’m going to fight this to the bitter end. It shouldn’t be possible that a fcuking loan is considered as income. That’s really fcuking unfair.

And to make matters worse, it’s the third Tuesday of September, Prinsjesdag, so the government has offered the proposed budget plans for next year to the Lower House. And you know what?

Starting next year, sleep medication will not be paid out of insurance any more. That’s another 240 EUR right down the drain. Sleep medication that has been prescribed by two different doctors, and two different specialists. In other words, I think I might actually need that stuff. I’d rather do without the stuff, but hey, I kind of value a good night’s sleep (technically, it’s not sleep medication at all, but a relaxant - I have trouble falling asleep ever since I was a kid).

Fcuk this shit.

This live performance right here? Fiona Apple and Elvis Costello performing “I Want You”? This is the pinnacle of music - no, this is the pinnacle of art.

Seven minutes and eighteen seconds of pure emotion, frustration, and devotion. I am really not kidding when I say that Fiona is the best artist in human history. Whenever I see this performance, I’m just completely stunned, left breathless. You can see that the crowd knows they’ve witnessed something miraculous, you can see it in their eyes.

I would give up a lot for the opportunity to see Fiona perform live. I can live without my lungs, right?

We’re seven years and one day later, but the memories haven’t faded.

This, right here, is the start of a new era. I just hope that we’ll put the right people in the right place to make sure it’s not the beginning of an end, but the start of a new beginning.

Please, do tell.

Why do Republicans have so much issues with helping their fellow Americans? Why is it that they are not willing to share their wealth with their fellow countrymen, their fellow countrymen who probably need it more than they do? Why is it so difficult for Republicans - who are probably devout Christians - to actually practice what Jesus preached, namely to help your fellow man?

I live in a country where 45-50% of your income goes to the state. This sucks balls. Seriously. Paying taxes sucks ass. However, it makes me happy, and somewhat proud, that most of that money will go to making my country a better place to live for everyone. To make it prettier, healthier, cleaner.

But most of all, I’m happy that part of the money that I earn will go to my fellow Dutchmen and women who need it most, because they don’t have the means to take care of themselves and their families. It makes me happy that my money goes to that single mother down the street (I really have a single mom living down the street) who can use it to give her kids a decent education, or to buy a car so she can increase her opportunities for a job.

It makes me proud that my money goes to the sick and the ill, like my aunt, who was struck down by cancer ages ago, and who can now only work a few hours a week - I know that it is my money that makes her financial situation much, much better. I am thrilled that with my money, the mentally handicapped have the opportunity to contribute to society, so that they can feel dignified and a part of it. I am proud that with my money, we can build and fund schools so we can educate children with special needs who might otherwise end up in crime, poverty, or welfare.

It fills me with joy that my money is used to make sure that everyone has proper healthcare, that everyone, no matter how poor, rich, unemployed, or sick you are, you will always be treated, taken care of, and looked after. It makes me proud that because of my money, lives are saved. It makes me proud that with my money, the elderly, who have built this country, can live a relatively worry-free life.

Sure, this country isn’t perfect. Tax money is sometimes wasted, and it sucks that the people actually have little insight of where their tax Euros end up. But overall, I know that in a few years, when I’m done with university, and when I have a decent paying job, I won’t be working just for myself, or to make my own life better - but that I’ll be working for everyone, to make this country better for everyone.

What these Republicans don’t seem to understand is that if you spread the wealth, you end up with happier people. And happy people are more productive people. And more productive people are wealthier people. And wealthier people spend more money. And people who spend more money are good for the economy.

Everyone wins!

I really don’t get it. They say they’re Christian, but judging by their actions and beliefs, they’re about as far removed from Christianity as you can get.

It’s all just so confusing.