The Blog I Never Use

Okay, so it isn't really a tour, it's just Gina and killer and me.

We're going to be going to that Cascade College Alumni dinner thing and then we will be promptly wisked off to beautiful Camp Yamhill, just outside of Yamhill, Oregon. "All of this could be yours if . . . The . . . Price . . . Is . . . Right!"

We really want to visit our friends at Renovatus, but a friend, who used to counsel camp with us, actually, before any of you were there, I think (some time around 1989-1992), is in town from Africa (I don't know what part --Chipster maybe?) and has been sending messages about how much she wants to see "us" (Gina), and our parents keep telling us how much she and her husband and two (or is it three now) adorable children are looking forward to seeing "us" (Gina), so "we" (Gina --I came in after the decision was made) decided that we need to go to Southwest CofC on the Sunday after camp, and we have to be out there by 1 or so on the Sunday before, so it looks like we won't make it (there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth).

So, PLEASE COME VISIT US AT CAMP, or find us at the alumni dinner. I really want to see the cutest little meatball around, and I've really been missing you all in blog world, so please come out if you can. I think Jessica should get to smash a pie in my face if she wants to (though I prefer cake).

[I will most likely be moving back to Portland for a few monthes, during the next year or so, to help my parents prepare their house for sale and maybe to give Gina and Steve time to find a house in Maryland, so I'll get to visit at some point, and I suspect that Gina has some plans in the works that might let her come and visit later too, but I haven't talked to her about that, I'm just guessing]

Please read both of the following

I've had an emergency come up, but it isn't mine to share, so I'll let Gina fill you in. I can let you know, though, that I need to work on my thesis without interruption for the next few weeks, and then I'll be at camp for a week, and then I hope that I'll be far enough along to blog again. I am going to miss you all, but you gotta do what you gotta do.


Okay, so for your sake I'd better clear up my Raj Posts. After R, A and J made their admissions, the following comments were made to Arwen's blog:


At 6/09/2006 12:12 PM, Ty said…

All this time I thought it was just Ryan (and Jess), I figured Arwen was in the loop, but most of the humor reminded me of Ryan.


At 6/09/2006 12:16 PM, Ty said…

Oh, I forgot to say that I did give up on that idea when he said stuff that might actually hurt someone, then I figured that the stylistic choices were just coincidence, but I still couldn't believe that someone with that personality would have such good spelling (I've known a few real raj's, but I never thought that any of them might be able to spell).


At 6/09/2006 12:39 PM, arwen said…

Hey Ty, it's ok if you were fooled... lots of people were. You don't have to be strong for us. We tried to fool you...


At 6/09/2006 2:30 PM, Ty said…

First, I intended to say that I had not thought Arwen was in on it.

Second, You have no idea how often I heard Ryan repeat something that wasn't funny (I lost my virginity ____ --usually to Brent, during High School), until it did become sort-of funny.

Besides, if you haven't noticed, I overthink almost everything, that is why I never commented on Raj's insults, after I gave up on the Ryan idea, I thought that Jen's husband or someone was playing a persona to see how all of us "good Christians" on the list would react, and then they would spring it on us and say, "see how you would have driven away a non-Christian instead of treating him with love." Tell me Ben wouldn't do that!


At 6/09/2006 7:13 PM, Jess said…

Ty, don't be a weiner, you didn't know! And I think I was the majority of the humor, thank you very much (not your precioous Ryan or whatever his name is)!


At 6/09/2006 10:53 PM, Ty said…

Wow, Jess, then I am impressed. I didn't know that you were THAT funny (though I did know that you were funny).

I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings by saying that I suspected something, I should have just kept it quiet, but I though that I was pretty clever (even if it was only one of several things that I thought of), and I like feeling clever, so I, stupidly, said something,.

Now, don't believe it if you don't want to, but please let it go; I know I'm just asking for ridicule here, but Ive had a stressful week and I really don't need all this right now, so I'll take my own advice and shut up.

I have to do thesis work without interuption for a while (I'm sure Gina will explain) but I'll miss you all until I can return to the blogmunity. I may be able to post periodically, but I probably shouldn't, the schedule is just too tight.


At 6/09/2006 11:33 PM, Jess said…

Sweet little ty, I was only joking. We are friends and you are no weiner. I will never call you that again. And that is a scientific fact! Good luck on your thesis...and good job figuring it out!


At 6/09/2006 11:46 PM, Ty said…

HA! I Raj-ed you out. We're even now.

BTW- I don't understand how you guys could wait so long before telling . . . it was driving me nuts.

I really do have to work on the thesis though.


At 6/10/2006 12:15 AM, Ty said…

Now I'm having "liar's remorse," sorry guys, I love you all and I'll never do it again.

(P.S. I also know that, for comedic effect, I should have waited a few days to tell, but first, I really am a terrible liar, I always want to tell the truth as soon as I tell the lie; second, I'm going to be off-line, and I knew that I'd feel like I had to come clear it up while I'm supposed to be working, and then I'd get caught up in blogland again)


At 6/10/2006 10:36 AM, arwen said…

ohhh... Ty... you are pretty amazing... except for the whole telling mere hours after you started... in that aspect, you kind of... how do i put this kindly? Um. you suck at that part. But the lie? You reign supreme. That was awesome.


Now I have to say: Yes Arwen, I do, I do and it was. I just don't have the patience to do it right. But I have great ideas (if I do say so myself). I'm sorry if I upset anyone, I was trying for the Raj style of being hurt for a dumb reason, but I like all of you too much to drag it out, and I'm afraid our friendship, exclusively in blogworld or not, would suffer more than I want it to.

My thought process: somewhere someone told me that if you want deception to work, make as much of it true as possible. Well, I was going to comment that I thought that Raj had been asked to start the blog by Stacy to bring more people to her blog, but when not enough of us came, he decided to quit and thought that it would be funny to get upset about things much less offensive than what he did.

When I started to type, I realized that RA&J were rather proud of their deception, so I decided to change my comment to say that I suspected it all along. I had to hope that they would get upset, otherwise I'd have to escalate the annoying comments until they did. From there I called on actual experience to make a pathetic post to make them regret the whole thing, but then I thought about how upset i would be if I thought I had actually hurt one of you, and I realized that I had to leave blog land to write. I couldn't just leave it there, so I felt like I had to respond to Jess right away, before it went too far (and earned her enmity forever).

So everything I posted was true, except suspecting Ryan of being Raj, and having a dozen ideas of who he might be. I'm sorry for those lies and I repent, but as I said, I like feeling clever, so I just had to do it.

I bet that this will come as a shock to you:¡ I talk too much. Especially when I'm nervous or when there is silence to fill. I talk and talk and smile and talk and eat and talk and walk and talk (but usually not on the phone).

This has caused many problems for me:

In the Sixth Grade, my teacher (the same teacher Rebecca Marie had) told me that I was lying because I said that my Grand Father worked on the Nautilus. He thought that I was talking about Captain Nemo's ship, because he interrupted me before I got to that part. I was very embarrised, but I still talked into silence.

There have been a thousand times that I wished that I had shut up and hour before, but, as Ron White says, "I had the right to remain silent, but I didn't have the ability." Usually those times were the product of feeling like I was "on stage," like I was supposed to entertain or inform.

Now, I don't suppose that would be so bad, but I have often forgotten to say something that I intended to say, or something I thought was unimportant or assumed, and left the wrong impression (as Lisa and Arwen know from blogworld), and then what can you do? You either try to solve the misunderstanding or you let it go. I nearly always choose the wrong one with sometimes terrible (for me) results.

For instance, let me just tell you that shame is the thing I dred most in life. I don't mind being insulted for the sake of humor, (as long as people don't make it clear that they think it is true) and I'm willing to return the favor when someone jokingly insults me, but if it is serious, or only half joking, I choke on the shame for years.

Case in point: five or six years ago, I explained an event that had happened ten years before, to a very good friend who was involved in one part of it, but I left out the explanation for a part of that situation with which she was very familiar. Well, to make a long story short, the year before last she made some "funny" comment about me lying a lot: I still haven't quite recovered, but I didn't feel like I could talk without giving away just how upset I was, and we were in a restaurant, so I didn't want to cry, so, I just left my (now reduced to average-level) friend thinking that I was okay being called a compulsive liar and that I agreed with it.

Oh well, I do lie occasionally, but, believe it or not, I'm usually telling the truth, I just don't explain enough, usually because I think people already know the parts I've left out, or because those parts aren't important enough to me to make it into the story. Someone that most of you know, who has never really cared for me, once attacked me for repeating something that I heard as a "fun fact" on a kids' cartoon show (because I tought it was funny), that a duck's quack doesn't echo. I even said that I didn't know if it was true, but that is evidently not good enough. Sorry.

This tendancy to talk too much, though, has also helped me out several times too. Once in Jr High, we had to give five-minute speeches in the style of commercials, for any type of item, with at least one prop. As Chris Bello did his commercial for "Colon Cleanser" an actual product that he had found in Costco (I think), I realized that my speech was supposed to follow Chris' immediately, and I had NOTHING planned. So I thought, "one prop . . ." and looked through my pockets and in my book bag . . . my wallet. "What can I do with a wallet that will be visual enough?"

In the end, I remembered my mom joking that, with the rate at which Rockey movies were coming out, eventually they were going to have Rockey 75: Rockey Battles Geriatrics." Well, I couldn't remember the word Geriatrics, so I did a commercial for "Rockey 75: Rockey's battle with Alsheimers," in which Rockey (played by me) kept losing his wallet, even though it was in his hand most of the time. At the end of my five full minutes of sight gags, Mrs. Peterson said, "Now class, that is how to plan a presentation. It's obvious that he worked on that and practiced it several times before he got up there today."

Similarly, in college I had to give a presentation for cultural anthropology. I discovered years ago that if I overplan I don't do as well, so I bought props (mostly fruit) and I learned as much about the ethnographic details as I could. About ten minutes before the presentation, I finally figured out the angle that I wanted to take on it. Again, the teacher (Stan) held it up as the proper way to do a presentation.

Here I'll omit the story about winning a scholarship prize without scripting or practice (when I did poorly the year that I practiced too much).

So, I hate that I talk too much, and I apologise to all of you for talking your ears off when I'm nervous or "on stage," but I am also kind of glad that I can give good presentations without too much prep. Please forgive me when I sound like Pedanto, or when I don't think to include the right details in the story or when I am just telling a story that I think is funny.

When I took a health class as a Junior in college, we were encouraged (read:
required) to formulate at least one fitness goal: Today I have reached mine,
I now weigh more than two-hundred pounds and have a reasonable fat
percentage, thanks to my recent (and fairly regular) abnormal amount of
exercise. That's right, people, I put on weight, at least five pounds, by
walking 2,000 to 4,000 stairs and 12 to 14 miles every four days or so. Now
I am officially obese, at least according to the BMI charts, and I, an obese
person, am more fit than I have been in all my years as a husky person (i.e. since high school).

I wonder, if our society were not so obsessed with calling people names
because of their weight, if we did not feel obligated to categorize people
all the time, would we have as many eating disorders? I think not. I think
that the very system which seeks to make people healthy by providing them
with parameters into which they must fit in order to be considered healthy,
causes people to fixate on weight, which can result in either anorexia or in
habitual binges. Watching TV the other day, I saw a story about a woman with
severe anorexia, and guess what kind of commercial came on . . . You guessed
it, a Gold's Gym commercial and then . . . Yep, a Jenny Craig commercial.

"Do you fixate on how much you weigh? NO! . . . You DON'T!? What's wrong
with you? You need to get out there and start structuring your life around
food and exercise. After all, abstaining from food is god, at least when
combined with exercise. Ignore your relationships and obligations, they
can't be as important as looking good (by which we mean having all your
bones poke out through your paper-thin skin). Don't forget, Anorexia is
better than bulimia; bulimics can't lose as much and damage their teeth with
stomach acid, so try to be an anorexic first, and, if that fails, you can
always fall back on bulimia."

"Of course, if you can't manage either, that just means that you are always
going to look like a beached whale, so you might as well drink bacon grease
and eat as much refined sugar as you can, because you may explode from your
corpulence any way, and you might as well make as big a splat as possible."

So, you know of my (now occasional, rather than regular) ten-mile walks; and, if you read the comments on Jeb and Priscilla's blog, you know that I walked 2,000 stairs a few days ago. Since you Know that, I can tell you this: today I combined those two things. I knew that it was stupid, but I did it.

Then we got home and Gina called Steve, to find out that he would not get home until after 8. Since Steve and Gina just started walking two miles a night together last week (which, by the way, is a MUCH bigger deal than me running a marathon . . . on my hands . . . in the rain . . . carrying a merry band of singing Gypsies balanced on the soles of my feet . . . while I recite the entire Bible from memory . . . backwards . . . well, maybe not that big, but VERY BIG), it was going to break the habit on only the second day. So, you guessed it, I volunteered to walk the two miles too; afterall, what is two more miles on top of that? And I'd do it again too!

Needless to say (but evidently it isn't -- see comments on Jeb and Priscilla's blog), I AM SORE! I ACHE! MY FEET HURT! But I'll be okay and, "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger," (I know that you think that is from Nietzsche, but it is from Conan the Barbarian) so I'll be stronger too. Besides, I get to brag that I walked twelve miles AND walked about a mile of stairs (each way) in the same day.