hope that i get old before i die…

well, i took a chance and tried to get in touch with another old friend that i had lost touch with many years ago. this time i heard back right away and actually got to talk and a small email exchange. this girl was always a very good friend for many years and we just kind of lost touch for whatever reason. but we both never forgot about the other, it just turned into one of those things that happens sometimes. i have to say that it is an incredible feeling to know that you can almost just pick up where you left off after 10 years and things are different but yet still the same …sort of. now the real trick is to not lose touch again

well, i pushed my car to its limit (or so i thought) and managed to squeeze out 450 miles on my one tank of gas. but i found that there is still roughly one gallon left in the tank when the “low fuel” light comes on, so i *might* have been able to push it to 500 miles if i felt extra daring. but still, i got this car for its economy (and also that it’s a toyota, and i love toyotas. i was going through toyota withdrawal having a civic for a couple years). and so far i’ve averaged about 35mpg with a combination of city and highway driving. since the car is rated at 32 city and 41 highway, that should be an average of 36-ish mpg, so i think i’m doing alright there. but out of all the cars i have ever owned, i don’t think i ever *EVER* got 450 miles out of a tank of gas. i know it sounds nerdy to talk about my car’s mileage rating but i like to hold it over the guys i work with that complain about their paltry 15mpg in their big “manly” trucks…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4429000.stm

bush says it’s “deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how the war began”. EXCUSE ME?? i guess that talk of WMD’s, er weapons programs, i mean bringing democracy to iraq was not itself a rewrite of history. of course, the democrats are most likely not going to respond to this because even though bush’s approval rating is somewhere slightly above miniscule they’re still scared to be seen as “obstructionist” or “unpatriotic”. nevermind the fact that roughly half the senate dems have no credibility to criticize since they voted for this war based on the evidence that they now say is false and misleading. there were very few reasons for them to vote for the war, and so many reasons to vote against it. but now they find themselves with hardly any credibility against the war and trying to pretend that they were against it all along.

and of course the media is not going to point out the irony of the situation because they’re afraid that their big business parent companies will cut them off if they actually report something close to the truth for a change. and they also don’t want to be seen as kicking bush when he’s down. no, the only chance of seeing the bullshit exposed for what it is will come from american independent press and foreign news. which means that the average american will have no idea because they aren’t being spoon fed their news from indie/foreign press. it really makes me sick that the less popular bush becomes the more lenient the media goes on him. just about any other president in such a vulnerable position in their presidency could not expect to be given such a free ride as bush has been given, but i guess that’s exactly how he got to his position today, by being given a free ride wherever he goes…

i’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because i have quite a few online “friends”, although aquaintenances would probably be much more accurate. but i feel like i’ve been pushing a level of relationship on some of my aquaintenances that they may not be comfortable with. and if you are one of those people and feel this way, i apologize. i have always felt like online relationships are a good starting point for real life ones, but unfortunately there are some incredibly insane people out there who ruin things for us regular folks. and things being what they are, i can understand why some people would not want to actually know the face behind the keyboard.

when people “meet” each other through a much more unfiltered place like the internet, there are no safeguards that can protect you like there are in real life. on the internet there is no such place as a well lit, crowded street that you can lose yourself in, knowing that the crowd can keep you relatively safe while you try to get away from some stalker. there is no pretending to live a few blocks away when someone tries to follow you home. there is only you and your “address”, and once you lose that anonimity the only thing to do to prevent people from finding you is to move and leave no forwarding address.

and i hate being seen as one of those crazies trying to hunt someone down, and i hope that i don’t come off that way. but since my big move, i have found myself with fewer and fewer actual friends and only more and more close (and distant) aquaintances that i only know online and have never met or talked to in this place we call reality. so i guess i am trying to fill the void by getting closer to the people i feel closest to, and sometimes i think that i might overcompensate and end up pushing people away. all i can say is that i really am not a creepy internet stalker, nor am i a creepy real life stalker. i’m just another guy who thinks that it’s possible to become friends with someone you’ve never actually met and don’t know much beyond the text and pixels you see on your monitor. if i ever win the lottery, i’d like to visit each and every one of you that i know online but since this is not ever going to happen, i’d settle for just being able to get a little more than text and pixels.