Conflict of Interest Part 2

I suggest you read Part I first before proceeding.


"So what does my body language say now?"

Scott turned around to see Jan leaned up against the door frame with her arm up and her hip thrust out to one side.

"With poses like that, I always told you should be a model," he paused, "or at least a porn star."

Jan's fist met Scott's shoulder in such a hurry that Scott actually winced in pain.

"I see your kickboxing lessons are paying dividends," he said, rubbing his shoulder, "anyway, let's get going, we're late enough as it is."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

It wasn't the first time he caught himself gazing at her, and it wasn't the first time she caught him either. But every time she did, she just smiled and slowly turned away, her eyes trailing behind, leaving one last glimpse for Scott to steal.

"Want me to introduce you to her? That's Claire. I've known her for years." And without waiting for a response Jan coolly walked over to the girl who was at the bar, and proceeded to strike up a conversation. Scott watched with an interested smirk at first which quickly turned into slightly curious bewilderment when Jan pointed at him and the two girls laughed. He quickly approached the girls in a self-attempted rescue.

"You know, it's not polite to point..." he began.

Jan quickly interjected, "See, he's not as funny looking up close."

"No, you're right," the other girl offered, "maybe I need to see him from further away again to make a fully informed decision."

Scott stood there, dumbfounded, with a look on his face that didn't at all betray his total lack of knowing what to do next. Jan then lifted her arm in the air, pointed down to the ground and swirled a mini 360 with her finger. Scott looked at Jan, then at the girl and they both gave a slight nod. He took that as a queue to turn around and walk as if he was runway model, doing his best model strut down an imaginary catwalk.

"OOoooo and a nice ass too," the girl cooed and both her and Jan laughed. Scott began to turn around and say something, but then the a song began to play in the room adjacent to them. Jan grabbed the girl's arm and started towards the dance floor.

"I love this song," she yelled as she linked Scott in her other arm and dragged them both towards the music.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

So yup, there's part 2. I think I'm going to start writing more again, at least, I hope inspiration hits often enough to allow me to start writing more again.

"Sometimes when people forgive you, it is more about themselves than it is about you" - Teal'c, from Stargate SG-1

Tears of the Clown

Sometimes, those who laugh the loudest, are the ones who are hurting inside the most.

A young man goes to see his doctor. He is overcome by a terrible sadness and doesn't think anything will make him feel better. The doctor says, "Why not do something happy, like going to see Grimaldi the clown?". The young man answers, with a knowing look, "Ah, but Doctor", he says, "I am Grimaldi."

"Knowing what you don't want can be as important as knowing what you do want." - Sunrise Seeker

Try This at Home Kids!

Make a fist with your left hand. Put your thumb inside your fist and squeeze tightly. Take your finger on your right hand and stick it as far down your throat as possible. You have now realized you have no gag reflex.

"Out of convicted rapists, 57% admitted to reading pornography. 95% admitted to reading the Bible."

Absolution

I've recently gotten in touch with someone from my past... actually that's not entirely true. Someone from my past actually took time and effort to get in touch with me, and I am glad she did. One of the reasons being that something in my past that I didn't even think would ever come up again, let alone needed sorting out, surfaced. At the bottom of Sorry, I said that I intentionally hurt someone and that she deserved it. Well, this person found me, and she came back into town and we had lunch. We hadn't talked in about 10 years, and she asked me why we lost touch. She seemed genuine, and she told me she forgot why we ever grew apart. At the time, I lied and told her I forgot too. Anyway, she went back home and we corresponded here and there through the 'net. I wrestled with over the next few weeks whether or not I should have told her that it was because of me that our friendship ended, or just lie and insisted that I forgot as well. I decided that a friendship based on lies, even though it might have been a white one, was wrong. I have to live by my own words, "The right thing to do is most often the hardest thing to do." Like any healthy relationship, a solid friendship needs a solid foundation. I reasoned that if I told her truth and we could still be friends after, that would speak volumes about her current character and what type of person she had become. And if she never wanted to talk to me again, that would have been well within her right and I would have understood that too. Well, I bit the bullet and let her know the truth, having no idea how she would react. I expected the worst, but she gave me the best. She knew that she hurt my friends, but didn't know how deep she had cut them. I made the same types of mistakes when I was young. Through the ignorance of youth, and not fully realizing the consequences of actions, we both had hurt people. Growing older has allowed her to see what she did was indeed wrong, and in admission, apologized for her actions. I could do no less than accept the apology and return one of my own for intentionally hurting her. How could I not, having made the same types mistakes she did? I've paid for my mistakes, and she has as well. The catharsis was welcome, for both of us, and now we remain friends.

"There is nothing in a caterpliiar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly." - R. Buckminster Fuller

A Reply to Those Who Forward Hoaxes and Chain Letters

I am still receiving hoax and chain emails that have been circulating for at least a decade. How do I know for at least a decade? Because I remember seeing them in my inbox that long ago! Seriously, how do people believe this stuff? I know that some people just forward these emails to a dozen of their friends without a second thought, and that scares me, it really REALLY scares me. Do these people not stop to think about the consequences of their actions? I can only see 3 reasons why someone who fan the SHIT of chain/hoax emails around.

1. They actually believe that by sending the email that they will receive good fortune. My reply to these people would be to drive over to their house, whip out my "Ignorance Be-Gone!! Stick"™, and start applying it to them as viciously and vigorously as possible.


2. They think, "Mneh, it probably won't happen but there's no harm in sending it out anyway right?" To those people I would reply using the same as above, except I would use my "Don't Be So Damned Ignorant Stick"™.


3. They know about but don't give a crap about the network and server degradation these emails can cause and for shits and giggles want to see how many fools fall for it by seeing how many of these emails they get sent back. To these enlightened but dirty sons of bitches, I would like to use my "Enlightened but Dirty Sons of Bitches Stick"™, which is really just a chainsaw.

Anyway, something snapped in me today... instead of just deleting the offending message and sending it into the digital netherworld, I wrote a reply. I think I did this because I am just TOTALLY FRACKIN' (thx BSG!!) SICK of the ignorance and laziness out there on the Internet. This general sloth and lack of thinking is part of the reason why you (and I) get hundreds of spam messages (yes I know about spam filters and all that but that's just not a final solution). It is this same ignorance to why I get called all hours of the day, sometimes spend hours on the phone, and sometimes have to drive across the city and spend a few hours at a family member's house, to have to run 3 separate anti-spyware programs on their computers. It is the reason why companies spend tens of thousands of dollars and sometimes lose hundreds of man hours. Here is my reply in it's entirety. Just my real name has been edited out and replaced with a one you readers are more familiar with.
(edit: Sorry if the above paragraphs sounded very angry, but it was at the end of a long day and I was tired. I know that some people have the best of intentions when they send out those emails. But as a guy who does free tech support constantly for family and friends, these types of emails really raise my ire.)


Hi, my name is SunriseSeeker and I have grabbed all of your email addresses as people who have proliferated this email. It was super easy for me to grab your email addresses. Now imagine I was someone who harvested email addresses for malevolent reasons. Thanks to you, I now have close to a hundred email addresses. If I have saved each one of these types of fake emails and other chain letters I have received over the years, I would have literally hundreds of thousands of email addresses. Now you may be thinking to yourself, but I only send these types of emails to people I know, I trust them. That's not the point. There are at least 3 reasons why emails like this are sent out.

1. To create so much email traffic so that it can literally cause network and email server crashes. You may think you're only sending this email to 15 of your friends, but if your 15 friends send to 15 of their friends, and each of those 15 send to 15 more, I'm sure we've all done enough math in school to get the picture. And yes, there have been cases in history where some Internet Server Providers have crashed due to an overload.


2. People who hate Microsoft and want to flood their systems with phone calls and inquisitory emails asking about this email.


3. As mentioned above, there are people who harvest email addresses for spam, unsolicited email, and other malevolent uses are just WAITING to get their hands on these emails one way or another. Trust me, although you are only sending this email to your friends, the "bad guys" have their ways of getting their hands on these emails. Not only are there email addresses in these emails, but I also see addresses and phone numbers of companies. Now, some of you in larger companies may not know how much it costs your IT department to fight spam and other forms of unnecessary network traffic, but trust me, it's ALOT of money being spent and I know that every penny spent fighting spam is a penny not being added to your paycheque.

So please, STOP sending chain letters, and other hoaxes like this. You may think you're doing your friends a favour by letting them in an "opportunity" like this, but after the invasion of privacy I just demonstrated to you, are you REALLY doing them a favour?

Just remember the old adage, if it's too good to be true, it probably is.

If you're not sure if something you receive is a hoax, remember, Google is your best friend! A quick 20 second search of Microsoft Email Hoax brought up a plethora of results. Here were the top 3.

http://www.hoax-slayer.com/ms-money-giveway-hoax.html
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/nothing/microsoft-aol.asp
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/03/microsoft_hoax.html

You may ask why I am taking my time to type out this long email when it would have been so much easier to just ignore it. Sure, I could have stuck my head in the sand, hit the delete key and went on my merry little way. But how am I protecting myself and my friends by not trying to stop this from happening? So as tiny as my single voice is, I am trying to get the word out. BUT, if each of you who receives this email just deletes the next hoax you get, instead of sending it out, you could have saved thousands upon thousands of spam messages sent your friends inboxes, or sent to other people's inboxes using you or your friends email address as the sender. Better yet, if you send this email out to the people who send you the hoax emails, maybe we can start fighting back against the spammers?! Let's combine our voices and let's make a difference! If you're too lazy to do that, then at least don't spread the spam messages. Please, on your friends behalfs, just delete them.

Thanks for taking the time and reading ths email all the way through, I, and I am sure your friends who will be saved from spammers, thank you.

Please excuse any spelling or grammatical errors, it's late here and I am off to bed.

It felt kinda good actually, to have some hope that I might actually make a difference against this ongoing and mountainous war against spam. Hopefully I have just armed a few more soldiers to help me in my fight.

"If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem." - Unknown

Pain Sponge

Do you believe that sometimes things are better left unsaid?

I believe so, even at the expense of personal happiness.

Someone once said to me:

"I think it's better to leave things unsaid if there's no good that can come from it, or if it'll only cause more pain/hurt than good"

But what if saying that something is a major relief to you, even though it may not benefit or even slightly hurt a person you care about?

For the people I really care about, I sometimes am a Pain Sponge. I soak up their pain if there is a chance that they can come out happier. The reason why this entry is here, is because I was reading some old email correspondence sent between a friend and I, and I was telling that person a story of what happened to me and this girl, let's call her Eve.

I was totally head over heels for Eve. I chased her hard. We had a few very deep talks and went out together quite a bit. I thought things were going very well. I was letting go of every guard and safety I had built over the years and was running in full flight... straight into a brick wall it turned out. Somehow, she ended up dating someone else. That hurt, a lot. But Eve was a very sweet girl, and hella fun to chill with, so I tried to turn my feelings of amour to ones of platonic friendship. I saw her quite a bit because we had the same circle of friends for a while, so it was hard on me. But I thought I managed my emotions quite well. Months passed, and I saw less and less of Eve. But for some reason, my heart never let go of its feelings for her. Time had failed to slowly put out the fire that burned inside me. Every time I saw her, it was a little painful. But I pushed those feelings aside and managed to stay good friends with Eve. More months went by and I heard through the grapevine that Eve's relationship wasn't going so well, they fought a lot and Eve was starting to get very unhappy. But I know that she was very loyal and would try her hardest to make things work, that's the type of girl she is, and part of the reason why I think so highly of her. So despite my emotions for her, I felt it was my duty as a friend to help her.

One cold winter December night, I received a call at 2am. I was already fast asleep, trying to get 8 hours of shut-eye before work the next morning. Needless to say, it was Eve on the phone. I could tell she was crying and she really needed to talk. There was no thinking required, I immediately got dressed and drove in -20 Celsius weather in the dead of night to her place. I arrived at about 2:30 or so. She opened the car door and got in the passenger side. Although she wasn't crying, she was trying hard to hold back the tears. We just sat there in the parking lot and she talked while I listened. She told me that out of everyone she knew, she felt like I was the only one she could talk to. Inside me a war was raging. You never want to see the girl you love in tears, and especially not because she's in love another guy! I felt helpless as she told me all the problems she had with her boyfriend. My brain could hardly keep in heart in check. It took all the willpower I had to not tell her that I have been in love with her all this time; that she should forget this loser and that I would never EVER let her cry like this. We sat side by side, me in the driver's seat and her in the passenger seat as she told me how her boyfriend kept letting her down, how she felt that he didn't respect her, and then she lost it, the dam burst. She reached out and I instinctively reached for her and wrapped my arms around her as she pulled me into her. I could feel my body immediately getting warm as the body heat rises when someone is crying. I could feel her tears soak my shoulder. Here we were, 4 am or so, parked in a parking lot, a cold December morning, the girl I am in love with crying over someone else; then it started to snow. It was like a scene from a movie. I stroked the back of her head and I knew that the best thing I could do for her right now was to let her cry it out. Although each sob felt like a stab in the back, I felt it would be extremely selfish to try and remove those daggers. Being the Pain Sponge that I am, I absorbed her anger and frustration, I sopped up her sadness, I soaked up her love... for another guy. Do you have any idea how hard it is, to have held her, held her so close to my heart, her heart bleeding, to feel her warmth, feel her every shudder, so close that I could swear I could feel her heart beat, but to know that she is in love with someone else, and that I could not tell her how I feel? I wanted with every fibre of my being to say those three words, the 1-4-3 that I kept bottled up now for months. It felt like hours had passed, but eventually the sobs subsided, her breathing became more even, and she pulled away and said sorry. I knew that was what she really needed, a good cry, and that after that she would sleep like a baby. I felt she was getting tired so I told her to go upstairs and go to bed. She thanked me for being such a good friend. But my mind already became numb, trying to dull away the pain that my heart was radiating. All I could manage was a weak "Anytime you need me Eve, you know I'll be there."

So she quickly opened the door and ran up the stairs to her door and waved goodbye as she let herself in. As soon as her door closed it was my turn. My turn to let all my anger and frustration, sadness and love... for her, out in tears. It was a long drive home.

My friend and I debated whether or not I should have told Eve everything. I told them although it would have been a great (that adjective doesn't even come close to what I want to say) relief for myself, to tell Eve, it would have made her life much worse. I had to be a pillar of support for her, and if she knew how I felt, she may have felt that she wouldn't be able to lean on me, and she had told me that I was the only one she could talk to. My friend told me thought that I deserve to be happy, that maybe not telling her was the wrong thing to do, to which I said:

"Don't get me wrong, there's happiness out there, I'll look for it. But I've already accepted the fact that I may not always get what I want, so I might as well help others get what they want."

It's all part of my "Sometimes the right thing to do is the hardest thing to do" life philosophy

"People are like jigsaw puzzles where the pieces change shape over time. Some pieces may look really similar but won't fit together, other pieces might not look alike but fit perfectly. It takes luck and timing to find a piece that looks like yours and fits." - Sunrise Seeker

Tell Me

I wrote this poem a long time ago, probably when I was 22 or 23 at the time. I was lost back then, very lost. I was hanging around several different crowds, flirting with the gangster/drug scene, at the same time being a computer geek and still playing lots of sports. I was meeting a lot of people, and I felt that I didn't truly fit in with any of them. I know knew who I was. But despite being as strong as I am, when you don't feel close to anybody, and you can't see yourself becoming close to any of your friends, it feels like you're alone in a crowd and drowning in it. I guess I was waiting and wanting for someone to see though my smiles, see through this superficial me that I had become in order to try and have a good time, see that I was actually floating face down in my pool of facades and confusion, and find ME.

Tell Me

I wander through my depths,
the fog that is in my head.
Who am I? Where am I going?
Can you feel the pain of my memory?
There is no shelter to hide me from myself.
My walless prison holds strong.
And the song plays on...
In open fields I run, trapped only by that which I cannot flee,
myself, do you understand?
Enter my valleys and indulge in my rivers.
Fly through my skies and swim through my clouds.
I have much to offer thee.
Read my stories, sing my melodies, use me abuse me.
And the song still plays on...
Sense my vibrations, feel my thoughts, hear my echoes.
I sing without a voice.
A knight with no kingdom, a soldier with no country.

I tread through the waste
and see something in the debris.
A one way mirror into my soul
but I cannot see, I cannot see.
Tell me reader, about me.
Sing me a song, sing me my song.

-Sunrise Seeker

"It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else." - Erma Bombeck

BSG Thou Art a Cruel Lover

So it's the last season of the best show on TV, Battlestar Galactica. To those fans that are watching (actually that's kind of redundant because the show is so good that if you even watch one episode, you'd be an instant fan), I got a question. What do you think Earth will be like when they find it? Will it be a futuristic Earth, or a modern day Earth like today? Or do you think that maybe they'll find an ancient Earth? And how will their religion tie into all of this?

Ah BSG, you do this to me every week, tease me, titillate me, show me what I want and still leave me wanting more.

"In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you wake up in the morning." - Carl Sandburg