Rising Above Mediocrity
by Benjamin Geiger

Excuse my descent into Dear-Diary-land… on the second thought, it’s my blog, and if you don’t like it you can get bent. So there.

My dating life has been 100% nonexistent for as long as I can remember, except for the short-lived thing with Janine. I would joke about being the “mayor of Friendsville”; most of the women I knew would come to me when they were having problems with their boyfriends. In their eyes I was the standard by which others were measured but I was always ignored. (If I had a dollar for every time I heard “I wish he was just like you!” I would be rich enough that they’d actually notice me.)

To be completely truthful, very few of them were even my friends. Most of them were merely acquaintances to whom I was occasionally useful as an open ear.

Things seem to be changing.

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Last Monday, I went to DisneyQuest for my usual workout session (a few hours playing Pump It Up), when I was met with a shock: the machines were gone! I panicked. As I flew up the stairs, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief as I saw my three trusty electronic friends sitting in an isolated section of the fourth floor, overlooking the “Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blaster” rink.

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I ran errands today at the Tampa campus of USF. While going from my car to ENB, lightning struck nearby. Very nearby. The flash and thunderclap were virtually simultaneous, and intense. Afterward, I could hear at least a dozen car alarms going off.

Once I made sure I was unscathed, I realized how cool it seemed. (I also made sure to keep my Powerbook disconnected—battery instead of AC power and 802.11b instead of Ethernet—for quite a while afterward.)

After many years of faithful service (and a few months of finicky service), “sleight-of-mind”, my Linux box, gave up the ghost recently. One of the hard drives failed. Luckily, the drive that failed was not the drive that held /home.

For the past year or so, sleight-of-mind has been serving as a router/firewall and file server. Since it died, I’ve been using the internal modem on my Powerbook to access the net. (I’m on dialup. Pity me.)

Soon, I’ll get a replacement drive and rebuild the box that was once sleight-of-mind. I’ve been saying that I wanted to replace Gentoo with Debian, and that I would do so as soon as I was forced to reinstall Linux, either due to my own stupidity or an external impetus. Hard drive failure is a sufficient impetus.

As part of a response to this entry, Terry Jenkins wrote:

If you function better while on [Lexapro]- get some positive “function” going and you will realize that you will become (more)confident as a function of your competence. Confidence, like self-esteem is earned through successful accomplishment. It is not an “attitide” that one assumes (in my view anyway).

I’m afraid that I must respectfully disagree. Confidence is an attitude that can be assumed, if one is willing to ignore or deny reality.

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