Help Me, Internet!

The problem:

So, there's this girl that I like.  I have (really) liked this girl for a long time.  We've been pretty good friends for awhile, and I never wanted to ruin that friendship by admitting that I had feelings for this girl (well, I guess that technically she's a woman, but I digress), so I kept it to myself.

So during one of my spells of boneheaded insensitivity I criticized something this girl said, and we got into an argument, and then I did something unbelievably stupid:

I told her how I felt about her.

This is not something that I normally do with women.  I am an emotional coward, and my tendency is to usually just wait until they find someone else that has better looks, more money, or a nicer personality and then to write it off as "c'est la vie." If I stay away I can usually stay friends for a very long time, which to me is better than nothing, which is what I usually have after I ask a woman out.

Now, she's a nice person, to be sure.  She talked to me after I told her this (two days ago).  She told me (before) my confession that my most unattractive trait was my negativity.

Hard pills:

Now it's true that I have a predisposition towards the negative.  I'm no optimist, quite frankly.  But over the last few years I've actually started to come out of that funk, but unfortunately she only knows me by reputation beforehand.  I am still very self-deprecating, and I have a weird need for positive reinforcement that comes from growing up with excessive negative reinforcement.  I understand this, and it's one of the things I've been trying to change.  This has been helped by (of all things) supplementing my diet to keep me from the deep lows that I have fallen into in the past.  I haven't had any for awhile, but old habits are hard to break. On her end she's been going through a tough spell of late, and I also fear that my advances have come off as predatory.  This wasn't my intention, but I wanted to comfort her in her time of need. 

How I handled it:

I made her a music video.  It's really just me singing badly but it does have several layered special effects and I'm not ashamed to say that it took me a while to make (and several crashes of the software messed up some effects) but it was nothing if not funny.  No, I'm not going to show it to you.  It's private.

I've been trying really hard not to text her, but since that day she's barely said two words to me.  My fears are confirmed today:  she is avoiding me.  I opened Pandora's box, but after the monsters flew out there doesn't seem to be much hope left. I'm out of ideas.

Help me, internet!

I'm probably just going to give it time, even if she ends up stomping on my heart I can't change the way I feel about her. I'm still looking for advice, no matter how crazy or boneheaded you want to be, I want you to share your stories, I want you to tell people that you're hurt and you're not even sure why, or that you overcame the odds.  I want to hear your comments, so that I can find camaraderie and maybe even a little hope!

Oh, okay. Here it is. Yes, I am a dork!

Burn them all down!

Back in '94, I got the fool idea in my head to learn a computer programming language so that I could make my own video games. I tried to get my other friends interested, but none of them shared my passion for the medium. Unfortunately, over four-thousand dollars and one correspondence course later, I had learned nothing, and swore-off computers forever.

Forever lasted about five years, and in '99 I was ready for another PC. This time though, I wanted to focus on coming up with ideas for games and not actually building them myself, to learn programming at my own pace. This never happened - I had a job as a computer operator, but was not well educated enough to get a job programming for my company. This is when I decided to go back to school to learn more about what I wanted to do - make video games. Unfortunately, by the time I managed to get everything together to do it, a stock market crisis (9/11) robbed me of the funds that I wanted to use towards that end.

As a result of my destitution, I began working part-time at a local video game retailer. The plan was that (along with my subsequent bankruptcy) having basically no income would allow me to borrow more funds to attend school. My parents made it clear early on that they would not help me in this endeavor, as their finances were stretched thin as it was. Yes, it is indeed a twisted system, but the funds would have been forthcoming.

I began to seek attendance at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (AIP), who was starting a Game Art and Design program. I want to make it clear from the beginning that I wasn't really interested in the art so much as the design. I was hoping that the school would help me unlock the process by which games were made, as well as honing the skills that I would need to express my ideas more clearly. While I wanted to wait until the summer quarter, the school insisted that I sign up for the spring. In doing so I had to use an older 1040 tax sheet which showed my income as considerably more than what I actually had made the year before, thus denying me sufficient funds for awhile. The school began charging me interest when I had opted to wait on interest, and their financial department seemed bound and determined to squeeze every last cent that they could out of me while I attended school, leading to some very bad weeks where I couldn't even afford ramen noodles to feed myself (I actually went five days without eating because I was broke, while the government refund checks that I was given had to be signed over to the school every quarter, for reasons they never sufficiently explained to me). Not that I didn't work during this time, but my employer seemed satisfied to give me four hours a week sometimes, just to spite me, I guess (you need at least twenty hours a week as a student to qualify for food stamps).

As time went on at AIP, I began to notice a great bit of disparity in their standards: I was apparently not good enough for the game art and design program from the start, so they put me in animation, a course that I was not interested in at all, for what they told me would be two quarters. When those two quarters were up, they told me that it was actually three quarters and that I was S.O.L.. Meanwhile, in the classes that I shared with the game art students, I noticed that quite a few of them were drawing stick figures ala third grade art class, and wondered if they really were better artists than me (the answer was a resounding "no."). By the time I actually did get into game art, I was behind. I wasn't learning anything in most of the 3D classes, usually because the teachers couldn't sufficiently answer any of my questions, but also because I later found out that they were forcing us to learn not the basics of the programs, but ancient, outdated methods of doing things that should have been avoided from the start.

Nearing the end of the three-year Bachelor of Science program, I began to feel as though I had completely wasted my time and money. I didn't know how to do anything that they wanted me to do because the teachers kept changing the cirriculum on us based on their own inability to manage time. My under-paying job was starting to get on my nerves, and the school career counseling department, which consisted of one bitter eighty-something senile old lady (who is as of this writing dead - and the new students won't even know what they missed, and should be thankful) wouldn't help me find something more in-tune with my major. I have to say that the school's counselors at that time were the most inept, impotent bunch of worthless human garbage I have ever met, and that's coming from someone who considers themselves worthless, impotent and inept!

My uncle at this point had decided to renege on his promise to me to buy my grandfather's house (not that I blame him for that, it's just that he couldn't have picked a worse time), so I had the added stress of losing a home that I couldn't make payments on - this too was my own fault, as I had taken a mortgage out on the place to pay debts some years earlier. I came home one winter to find that part of the ceiling had collapsed and that the cold had allowed the mildew to take over the old place.

I'm sorry, let me sum up my points:

1.) I had declared bankruptcy so my credit was a mess.

2.) School was stressful, demanding, and unrewarding

3.) My job was stressful, low paying, and also really stressful.

4.) I was losing the house that my late Grandfather had entrusted to me, that I had never really appreciated until I had lost it. 

School portfolio review was coming up, and I didn't have anything to put into it. The new teacher they hired, Gabe, was just plain crazy as he wanted the game art students (who hadn't had any solid education in how to do anything) assemble a working 3D game in two weeks. I got a "D" in my low-poly modeling class because the teacher (Ruth Comely) decided to make it a high-poly modeling class, and spent all of half an hour explaining to us how to rig a skeleton to it. The horrifying thing was that at that point Ruth was teaching almost all of our classes and giving us Herculean homework assignments for each one, so she knew that we didn't have time - she just wanted to make our classes as hard as her master's degree classes were at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). She gave me the "D" as a favor - I couldn't figure out how to rig my model or do facial movements - when I should have gotten an "F." That's when I decided to leave school. I just couldn't compete anymore with all of the bullshit; I had come there to learn, but all they wanted to teach me was that I didn't know anything about it.

I left AIP in early '06. Almost a year later a collections agency contacted me and said that I owed them $7000, because AIP had charged me a little over $4000 but never bothered to tell me, and that they had tacked on collections fees and interest. I couldn't pay because I was making less than $20,000 a year at my new job, and most of that was used for paying rent, transportation, and utilities. I deferred those payments in a consolidation loan.

Why am I putting all of this in my blog? Well, a few weeks ago I received a call from Westwood College, wanting to know if I was interested in going back to school with them. I was skeptical, because I had such bad experiences with AIP and the correspondence school, but they talked me into applying, only to spring on me at the last minute that I needed someone to co-sign the loan. As per my parents telling me never to ask, I told them that it was an impossibility, and that I was sorry I had wasted their time. Last week I got a call from another recruiter for the same school, who told me that I didn't need to have a co-signer, and explained the options to me. I spent $100 for the application fee, only to be told by Westwood's financial services department that I needed a co-signer to get all of the funds that I would need. I restated for about the tenth time that there was no co-signer, and then they began suggesting "scholarships."  

An aside:

My view on scholarships is that they only benefit two types of people: 1.) Suburban rich kids who are so well off that they can spend time volunteering at various humanities and don't have to get a job by the time they're sixteen just to pay for a car that their father pressured them into buying. 2.) Rich or poor kids who are so ingenious that they probably don't need to go to college anyway. As I fit into neither category, I have never found a scholarship that I am eligible for.

At this point it was clear to me that I had been right all along in my assumptions that they were just pressuring me to sign up to fill some stupid quota, not setting me up to succeed, but hoping that they could drain me for tens of thousands of dollars before I failed. As part of the application fee was refundable, they only took me for $25.

I hate colleges, post-secondary schools, and trade schools. It is probably because I am so stupid that I can't grasp the tools that they insist that I use, but in my mind it is because of all of the hoops of bullshit that they make you jump through, making escaping them a financial mess. If I had it to do all over again, I'd tell AIP to shove it, and wait until I felt comfortable starting school; I wouldn't let them pressure me into starting something that I was unsure of right away, or let them change the rules on me at the last minute.

They've helped me to ruin my life more than I could ever do alone.

Backblog: January 8th, 2008. Where do these stairs go?

I needed money to do my laundry today, so I went downtown to withdraw the tiny amount left of what the state gives me to eat a cheap lunch and to get a roll of quarters. I set out at about noon, knowing that it was the lunch rush downtown, but not really caring about that one way or another (time is all that one really has when one can't land a job). I grabbed my denim coat, my Xbox Live baseball cap and my best pair of headphones plugged into my iPod Shuffle and headed downtown.

As I walked the three five blocks to the connecting bridge I began to realize how nice a day it was. I should have been wearing shorts and a tee. It must have been about sixty-five degrees outside and though it was windy it was a warm summer-like wind. I had thought about putting lunch off at that point, except that once I stopped walking to take a picture on the bridge I noticed the hunger pangs in my stomach (I never eat breakfast if I can help it – I'm just not active enough to warrant three meals a day). I made my way to the bank first and wound up waiting in line for about fifteen minutes while the elderly couple finished paying all their bills for their few remaining years of life (that's what it seemed like), but that didn't faze me all that much.

I felt, for the first time in a long time anyway, happy. Maybe it was the music that I was listening to, coupled with the warm, sunny weather, or perhaps it was the fact that I had a whole day ahead of me to enjoy those conditions and not be trapped inside some dismal office, warehouse or store pining to be out in it, but really felt good.

After getting my quarters (and thusly saving laundry for the next few weeks), I took the meager amount that I had left and went to Subway, as it was their $4.79 for a foot-long sub day. I got my usual club sub with all the trimmings and splurged for a diet lemonade, then found a table and ate at it, regretting that the store had no air conditioning and that their sound system was overbearing enough that I had to take my headphones off. I felt my mood drop a little while sitting there and watching people come and go. Thinking that my enjoyment had passed as I ate the mediocre sandwich, I wondered what I would do next. I finally decided that no matter what that I wasn't going to even think about being unemployed for the rest of the day. I finished my meal and then headed out the door.

I instantly felt elated and refreshed once more. While I feel that the weather conditions were not ideal for January, I have to admit that they were in fact ideal weather conditions as a whole. I just couldn't go back to the house yet; I needed to explore. I wandered around the city for a little while and pondered the eerie winter sun in the blue sky surrounded by cotton clouds. It gave the sunlight and warmth a magical quality that I don't see too often. It energized me. I decided to walk to Station Square on the other side of the Monongahela River. I needed to backtrack a little to do so, but I was feeling really good I did it anyway.

Station Square isn't and ideal place to be so early in the afternoon. There are an impossible amount of cars there because of the cheap parking, but there are hardly any businesses open. My heart was shattered when I saw that Hooters was closed… no, wait – I forgot that I hate Hooters (but not hooters; hey, I'm just a man). So, from Station Square I decided to walk to the Southside.

Once one makes it across the river it really isn't that far of a walk, so I made my way down East Carson Street. In front of one of the businesses there were a bunch of CD jewel case boxes that someone had emptied out over the sidewalk. I received all sorts of funny looks as I picked them all up and put them in a trash pile that was sitting on the side of the road. I didn't care, it just felt right. As I made my way across 10^th Street I began to think that I should stop to see if my friend Mallory was home. She lives in the heights of Southside, and though I knew that it would be a climb I settled on that proposition.

I knew that I had to turn at 12^th Street, but after that it was anyone's guess; I'd had trouble finding her place before, but as luck would have it I had my trusty GPS with me, and a waypoint at her house. I was elated to discover that with my walking speed and bearing the little device said that I would make it to her place in under fifteen minutes. As I walked this number quickly dwindled away to seven minutes. I didn't know if she'd be home or not, but I decided to see (if not I could always wait for her and Seth to come back). Then I hit the stairs…

Those steps that Frodo, Sam and Gollum had to ascend in Return of the King? Yeah, like that. There were so many, they were pretty steep, and I am very out of shape. A few years back a climb like that wouldn't have phased me even with a full frame pack on my back, but now I was stopping at every flat interval just to catch my breath. I began to wonder if I would have a heart attack then and there because my diet isn't exactly intrinsic to health food. This was not helped by the fact that once I reached the top of one set of steps a little Pomeranian dog jumped out from the other side of a fence and barked shrilly, scaring me half to death. Shortly after that, I knew that if I was to have a heart attack any time during my trek it would have been right there, and that made me feel better.

The rest of my trek was on some pretty even streets giving me a nice overlook of Pittsburgh as a whole. I attempted to take a panoramic picture, but without a tripod it didn't go as well as planned. That's okay. I made it to Mallory's apartment and was greeted by the sight of her beat-up old Geo and at once knew that she was home. I called her up to make sure that she wasn't busy at that moment, and she said that she needed to be to work at six. As luck would have it she doesn't work too far from where I live, so I was able to bum a ride off of her and not have to make a grueling climb back down those ridiculous steps. Mallory, Seth and I played a few board/card games before heading back.

All in all, I'm glad that I took the time to hike almost completely across town. I'm certain that I will be sore tomorrow, and I'm also certain that the weather will be turning back to the usual tallow snow of Pittsburgh winter within the week. I will not forget this day anytime soon, however, and being unemployed is what made it all possible. This was the first time it felt good to not have responsibilities outside of the daily doldrums of work that I've had since the 9^th grade, though the feeling will not last. Knowing the latter I must continue my fruitless quest to find a paycheck.