I’ve been told that my face is next to the word “gullible” in the dictionary. I wouldn’t be surprised, but I’m afraid to look to confirm or deny the statement…

• Right off the bat this morning, I fell for one of Slashdot‘s April Fool’s pranks. Bonus points to the person who can spot which one. (And no telling, Lilith!) I even knew that they were running prank stories, and I still fell for it. Gah.
  
• Marconi and Tiny hijacked Jaime Cooley’s email and sent out an “I quit” message to the all-staff group. I fell for it. Then again, I really do think Jaime deserves better than to have to put up with those two, but…
  
• Beyond the aforementioned spammer event, other work-related absurdity included a computer that refused to install a simple piece of software. I checked the computer for broken system files, I ran spyware removal (found lots of nastiness), I tinkered and fiddled to no avail. As a last-ditch effort I forcibly extracted the files from the installer into a directory. Lo and behold, it worked perfectly. That’s two hours of my life I want back, dammit.
  
• My day took a marked turn for the better shortly after 2:00 in the afternoon, when Lilith showed up for our lunch date. She chose the venue, a little bento-ish place just off Milwaukie and Powell. We ate teriyaki chicken and took turns ranting and raving and cracking wise. I wasn’t “all better” when we left, but I was well on my way to it.
  
• Luckily, nothing much happened for the rest of my workday, after which I went home and engaged Alexander in a half-dozen rounds of Slavemaster CTF Unreal Tournament. Not only is UT a great form of digital mayhem and destruction, but the Slavemaster mod means that we enslave those we destroy until they bring us enough stuff to earn their freedom. I won’t play UT any other way, folks. Hell yes.
  
• Wendi fixed spaghetti, and tonight we actually have parmesan cheese for it. Woo hoo! Now if only we can find my shaver…

And that’s the rest of my day, in a nutshell. Which is, as always, an appropriate receptacle. I can’t wait for Thursday when I leave for SakuraCon. Yeah.

So Wendi and I settled once again into the computer room for a nice, relaxing evening spent online. I fired up a web browser and AIM, she launched her present gaming addiction, The Sims Online. This is pretty typical, really, which tells you a lot about what kind of rock-and-roll lifestyle we lead at the Kerezman abode.

Wendi’s been playing “TSO” for many months. She’s quite devoted to it, having taken last year’s beta-testing duties to heart and possessing a sincere interest in the success of the game, as well as those aspects that detract from its success. In order to keep her property among the higher-rated places in her chosen “city,” she plays often.

Tonight she was in her property, welcoming newbies and building skills. At one point she took a bit of a break to trim Alex’s hair. Her Sim character was set a skill-building task, which is usually good for a few minutes if you need to step away from the computer. I, of course, don’t often pay much attention to the game, having burned out on the concept of The Sims quite some time ago during a week’s experience with the original game.

So you can imagine my surprise when I glance over and see this:

“Uh, honey?”

“Yes?”

“Uh, what exactly is your character doing?”

“Building a skill, why?”

“Uh, she just grabbed the top of the cage, pulled herself up, and started making humping motions. Is that normal?”

“Yep.”

“Oooookay…”

I swear to you that I am not making this up. I suspect that if more lonely geeks knew that there were interactive cage-dancing avatars running amok in this game, they’d be signing over their paychecks to EA Games in droves.

Let’s just say that this is a side of Wendi’s personality I never expected to see, and leave it at that.

Just a few random facts for your (complete lack of) edification.

• Budget Gourmet makes what may very well be the nastiest mac-and-cheese ever tasted by mankind. I think it’s even nastier than that time Christine made “green mac-and-cheese soup.” It’s bad, folks.
  
• When you’ve spent your entire adult(ish) life using an electric shaver, and one day your Braun shaver breaks, it’s far better to kludge the damned thing into some semblance of operation than to peel bits of skin off your face trying to use a cheap straight razor. Hell, I didn’t even get most of the hairs, yesterday. Gah. To hell with that.
  
• Mandrake Linux 9.0 makes a lousy place to start building Linux From Scratch, due to their complete failure to provide the glibc-static-devel RPM on the CD-ROMs.
  
• Counting on the generosity of the AMV creator community to get professional feedback on your new video is a bit like counting on Dubya to introduce bold, forward-looking environmental legislation. (So far, two of my friends have said they like the video. I’d still like to get critical feedback, though. And ErMaC never did return my emails.)
  
• Last but not least… when you spend two days reading books and playing Diablo II, you don’t get much writing done.

This isn’t going to be in any particular order, and it probably won’t make much sense. But then, if you’re a regular reader you should be inured to this sort of thing already…

Uncle George is still dead, and I still don’t know how or when it happened. I’m hoping to hear from Uncle Pete some time soon.

For all that I knew George the least of all of my immediate family, his passing has hit me harder than any other I can think of. It’s the pain of missed opportunities, of staring down the barrel of mortality, and of knowing that our particular clan is dwindling ever smaller. Perhaps the unexpectedness amplifies the effect. I had a closer relationship with Hjordis, but also knew for years that her time was coming.

Plug all of this “mortality angst” into my already-troubled psyche and what you get is a blubbering mess. My moods, always on an irregular swinging pattern, now vary wildly from minute to minute. I’ve spent a lot of time this past week forcing myself to smile, to be cheerful, to cheat my brain chemistry into a semblance of a positive mindset. It works most of the time, actually. In groups I’m positively ebullient. Alone I’m fecking miserable, until I catch myself and force a change of mood. It doesn’t take pills, just self-discipline.

That’s right, go ahead and roll your eyes. “Karel has self-discipline?” Okay, not that much, but maybe just enough.

Is this unhealthy? Probably. I’m a world-class wallower, though, and a couple of years ago I determined that I would no longer behave like that if I could at all help it. The pain is there, but I’m not going to wave it around like a flag for everyone I meet.

“Concentrate on the good things in your life.” I have the world’s neatest, smartest, most adorable kids. I have a job that tens of thousands of people in this city alone would gleefully kill for. For the first time in my life I feel like I have more than just one friend. Some of these friends are new, a couple are returning old friends. I treasure them all so strongly it makes my heart burst when I think of how lucky I am to know these people.

Do you want to hear the funny part? Having several good friends is contributing to my internal struggles. I’m relaxing again. I’m no longer repressing all of my desires and ideals for someone else’s sake. Once again I’m feeling and thinking all of the things that put me at odds with my wife during the first half-dozen years of our marriage.

I don’t think I can go back again, though. Stuffing myself into a box and nailing down the lid worked last time; I had to learn and grow in some important ways these last few years. It really was the right thing to do. Now I have to figure out how to reconcile the man I’ve become with the man I really am. Whoever the hell that is.

And I don’t know if I can do it without hurting people I care about. There’s nothing quite like feeling like a monster inside, is there?

Meet the Kerezmans. Frederick and Hjordis had three sons, named Peter, Michael and George. Michael and his wife had a son and daughter, named Karel and Christine. Karel and his wife also had a son and daughter, named Alexander and Erica.

That’s my family tree, for the most part, at least on that side of things.

Fred passed away when I was quite young, I believe it was back in ’79 or ’80. Hjordis died on “nine-eleven”, albeit in Texas instead of New York.

And my uncle Pete contacted us yesterday to let us know that his brother George is no more.

Exactly how and exactly when is still unknown. Apparently Pete and George had been in steady contact for quite some time, and Pete became worried when emails and phone calls stopped coming.

Pete will be travelling to New York soon to deal with personal effects and various legal matters. Hopefully he’ll also learn more about what happened.

George was a musician, and the last of our branch of the family to remain in New York City. You might like to poke around the website of his band, Crazy Mary.

I surprised my father last night by telling him about my vivid recollection of a jam session in our New York apartment when I was very, very young. I remember the long hallway from the front door leading directly to the big room with the double doors past which Dad and his brothers and friends would gather to play. (My room, by the way, was a hard right U-turn at the end of that hallway. I had a record player, a small bed and toys ankle-deep at all times.)

I remember being told more than once when I was younger that I looked a lot like my father but even more like Uncle George.

It’s a shame I don’t remember the man better. Goodbye, Uncle George. Be well, wherever you are.

Because I’m a lazy sod, I didn’t get around to writing the birthday recap entry until Monday afternoon. Therefore, you might want to read Lilith’s account of things first, then come back here for the rest. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Back again? Good.

So, about the not-quite-a-surprise dinner party. There’d been some speculation the week before, after Wendi insisted I give her Lilith’s and Mari’s phone numbers for a mysterious, unstated purpose. And then Wendi insisted that she’d contacted them but everyone had prior engagements.

Here’s the key part: I believed her. And yes, I have heard that the word “gullible” doesn’t appear in the dictionary. Thanks for helping.

Sadly, the secret was once again spilled (a bit of misunderstanding, actually, so no harm done) and I amused myself by watching as Wendi tried very, very hard to maintain the secrecy. She’s an absolute treasure sometimes, and I was torn between amusement and endearment all afternoon.

Case in point: I had second thoughts about the venue. I agonized over choosing a different restaurant for a while. Wendi stated her willingness to go along with my decision, even if it changed, but something in her voice sounded worried. Of course, once I realized what was up, I made a point of telling her that our original plan was “just fine.” The joy of relief practically lit up her face.

Dinner, then. We all ate ourselves into insensibility, as well you should when you’re paying that kind of money. Outback does make a pretty good steak, though. Yum.

A high point of dinner, for me, was when Mari started insisting to the waiter that they needed to sing Happy Birthday to me. He replied, “We don’t do that here. If they did, I wouldn’t work here.”

My response was, “You are a saint among men. Thank you!”

I didn’t turn down the free birthday dessert, though.

Presents. Mari picked up all three books of the Midori Snyder “Oran Queens” trilogy, though I really only needed the last one. She’s so cute when she’s exuberant. She also gave me the Fox dub-only DVD of “My Neighbor Totoro,” which is a Very Good Thing since our VHS copy is nearly worn out.

Side note: Wendi’s friends from church think Totoro is creepy. It’s okay, I like them anyway…

Lil’ and Geoffrey used my Amazon.com wishlist as a guide, yet somehow managed not to pick any of the anime material therein. That’s okay, though, since I now have the special fancy editions of Stargate and X-Men. Nicely done!

The other present came from The Kelseys in the form of (yet) another black sweater. Which, of course, I wore preppie-style over one of my white collared shirts. I’m such a geek. This provided some amusement during the early parts of Stargate. Whee.

After dinner, we all (Mari and Doug, Lilith and Geoffrey, Wendi and I) returned to the Kerezman abode for movie-watching and general hanging-out. Apparently Mari’s never seen Stargate, so that was enthusiastically selected. Too bad for her that we’re all a bunch of snarky bastards who can’t shut up. I’ll have to loan her the DVD some time, since in a way she still hasn’t really seen Stargate. The MST-style atmosphere did generate much laughter and good times, so it was far from a loss!

Sadly, the night had to end eventually. Doug had work to go to, and Lil’ and Geoffrey needed rest. Or at least the chance to enjoy a house emptied of demonspawn…

To all of my friends who were present, and to those who sent best wishes from afar, I give my sincerest thanks. It was absolutely one of the best birthdays ever.