In my endless cycle of realizing new depths of the same damn concepts over and over again, I'm back to the point of discovering that the sense of being in command of my life isn't something that just comes around at random times: it's something always waiting there for me to reach out and grab it. It's the choices I make, in my posture, in whether and how I make eye contact with people, in whether and how I decide to play the Male Status Game (which to my mind amounts to being a bit of an affable jerk, but it's a useful and sometimes fun or necessary role to play).

Ah, here we go. The military is spying on peace activists as "threats to national security". I think what we're going to discover over the coming years is that the post-J. Edgar Hoover period, when domestic intelligence has been severely restricted after decades of abuse by the FBI and other agencies, was an anomaly in our history. We don't exactly have a pristine history on that score: see the three different Sedition Acts we've passed over time.

In a similar vein, the NSA is spying on us, too. Who put these assholes in power? I must continue my studies into why people refuse to use their brains.

Taking note of the whole "war against Christmas" nonsense, someone responds, and has had enough of the whole thing.

I went up to Zeitgeist in San Francisco tonight, mainly to practice chatting up girls. Flirting and talking to complete strangers, at least as an introvert, is a skill, and it gets rusty. You start talking yourself down before you even start. It's the going ahead and doing it that really matters. As Wayne Gretzky said, you miss one hundred percent of the shots you don't take.