Suck it. 3 bowl games in a row. UT brings it home.

ADDENDUM FROM FINLEY:

Damn. 3 in a row, Ohio State.

I mean, bad enough that you lose the two national championship games in a row. But to lose on a last minute drive, AGAIN?

Wow.

Now, this is not to disrespect the Horns winning in such an awesome manner. Good work, boys. You earn this Tiger fan’s begrudging respect and a throwing up of the Hook-em Horns.

Out.

Well here we are in the new year.  Finley and I expect to have a new podcast out - we had expected to have one as a end of the year but no.  So this will be a quick re-cap of last year and a first podcast of 2009.

Gas prices are going up because of tensions in the middle east.  Suprise Suprise.

Tomorrow MacWorld will be going on and we’ll be following other websites instead of reporting ourselves, cause lets face it - we don’t have a travel budget.  This will be the final keynote done by Apple as a company as they are pulling out of large conventions and events.   I suspect we may see some interesting things.  I hear Snow Leopard is just around the corner.

Obama wants to give us $500 bucks tax credit this year.  This is not a check that you get to cash.  This is a tax cut that goes to your employer so they don’t withhold as much.  So if you usually had $100 in federal taxes held per pay check - they would hold $90 instead of $100 so you’d get an extra $10 per pay check.

Not only that - remeber the $600 check you got back in May of 2008?  Yeah you still have to pay that back.  So if you normally got $1000 refund check back from the government after April - you’ll only be getting $400 refund check because Uncle Sam wants his stimulas money back.

Update: finley pointed out it won’t be this year. But its just right around the corner ie. Next year.
Q. Will the payment I receive in 2008 reduce my 2008 refund or
increase the amount I owe for 2008?

A. No, the stimulus payment will not reduce your refund or increase
the amount you owe when you file your 2008 return.

Wetwired is going on it’s 8th year now, and it has always been a wonderful place for the people involved in Wetwired to vent, rant and frolic.

However, we have always considered Wetwired to belong to the readers, not the writers. We try to write stories and articles and posts that are designed to entertain you.

So in the middle of my last bitch session where I was saying “We write it for them, where the fuck are they? We built it, and they ain’t comming!” It occurred to me that we never asked the readers WHAT they would like to read, and what they would like Wetwired to be about.

So here it is: What do YOU want Wetwired to be?

What would you like us to write about? What topics would you like us to cover. More news, or more original content?

I mean, really we are open to suggestions. If what YOU, the reader, wants is close up pictures of our genitals painted to look like Smurfs? GREAT! We can do that!

(This would be easy to do, Finley’s junk already looks like Clumsy Smurf)

Pod casts? Sure! Just tell us what you want us to talk about.

Articles? Oh, we got the articles!

More contests and prizes? Bring it on.

How about a way for The Good Readers (as we refer to you) to request topics on a regular basis. We can do that too.

So, please, PLEASE leave a comment or email me directly at Beerslinger@wetwired.org

Really, his cock is blue and shriveled, with a lopsided crinkled cap. I’m not kidding, it’s Clumsy Smurf.

Thank you for you support.

Wetwired is not a finalist in the 2008 Blog Awards. Which means… we’ll have to work double hard in 2009 to improve the site.   Part of that I think will come with getting some help on the coding side to make sure that the site actually does work on every browser correctly.

In retrospect I think I need to go back to the drawing board on the site and come up with something truly unique and graphically pleasing. But As I have discussed with others, what good is a great design if you don’t have great content so we’ll also have to double our efforts in the content side of Wetwired.   The design of the site has been with a central theme for the past couple of years and we all agree that the theme is pretty unique.   I think its most likely usability.

2008 Wetwired in Review

This year has been an interesting year.  Considering the previous year was a do-nothing year.  Meaning we really didn’t do a damn thing.  I didn’t update the site, we hardly posted, we kind of took the year off.  2008 on the other hand had major changes.

We switched from Movable Type to Wordpress.

We switched hosts to go-daddy (saving a ton of money at the sacrifice of speed).

We contracted a new artist to re-do the artwork that had previously got us into the finals of best blog design of 2005.

We finalized the new design(mostly).  Aside from the footer part taking until November to get complete…

We started, for the fist time in the 8 year history of Wetwired, to put up advertisements.  Google Adsense, and a few products that we’ve tested ourselves.  While stylistically it goes against everything  I hate; it made sense.  Believe it or not Wetwired is just about paying for itself (cost of domain and monthly hosting).   That in itself is something I really didn’t expect.

Wetwired has seen the most traffic it has ever seen this year.  And we’ve doubled our daily traffic from last year.

We have had a semi-regular podcast for the first time ever and it has been fairly successful.  Including being on itunes.

We’ve had the re-appearance of Beerslinger from his 2 year hiatus.  And we’ve had a couple new writers come on board (prax and larkynm) who unfortunately post infrequently, but are a welcome addition none the less.

We have been interviewed by the Daily Texan (UT paper) and we recorded the interview and offered it up as a podcast.

And lastly I think I’ve updated wordpress versions 6 times this year with some major changes on the back end.  It’s been a pretty good year for them as they (wordpress) have added some great functionality and some great user options in an overhaul of the administration side.

Wetwired in 2009

I think 2009 will be a continued rebuilding year as we look for more local Austin writers who are interested in contributing (for free).   When I look at the amount of money pumped into the site it will be a while before we regain it through advertisement etc but I do see the site fully paying for itself, the operating costs so to speak, and I think we can look forward to having some surprises for our few loyal readers with anything we have left over.

When it comes to traffic, we’ll be working hard to continue to optimize wetwired and post more original content and/or commentary that is of interest and that continues to add readership.  I suspect that if we actually get on the ball this year we could potentially finally break out of the small blog arena.  You would think that after 8 years of being a website/blog that we’d have more traffic.. but Finley, Beerslinger and I all atribute the slowness to 3 potential things.  1. Laziness.  2. Alcohol.  3. Waking up in the morning in the front yard and realizing that those are not our flamingos…

Lastly, Austin has a booming local blogging scene.  With freaking monthly meet-ups!  I’ve personally been in Austin since late 2000 and never been to one, yet we’ve been posting here for quite some time.  I have met (albeit briefly) one other local austin blogger.  She was doing an imprav with Cold-Towne Theatre.   So at some point I suspect that we’ll come out of our holes and make an appearance at one of the local Austin meetings.

As the 2009 looks fairly bleak when it comes to the economy, I think Wetwired will do just fine.

Postscript

If you are interested in contributing articles to wetwired or interested in just getting involved in a project let us know by commenting.  We’ll be on the lookout for new talent, and/or we wouldn’t mind showing someone the administration side if you just want to learn.

Since I have their advertisement on the site and I use the product I thought I’d pass along some savings.  If you’re a fan of zagg invisible shield products go here. Buy a full cover for your iPhone or other gift and you can get 30% off whatever you’re buying by entering the code “sitewide30″.

The offer ends the 31st.

Here is the video of the scratch proof. Yes, I’ve tried this myself after I put it on - its not fake advertisement.

Their products have been featured on CNN as well.

We should be hearing shortly - or should have last night if wetwired will be a finalist in the 2008 Blog awards.

I have had a great day today… mostly.

I know… shocker, right?

The day actually started around 4:30 PM Christmas Eve. I had to work last night, and as such I haven’t been to bed since then.

I’ve been to three different houses, ate dinner earlier today and haven’t eaten since then. I’m exhausted, I haven’t slept in 27 1/2 hours and I shouldn’t be on the road.

This, of course, is when I get the call from my brother. “Hey, what’re you up to?”

I say that we’re relaxing, that I’m hanging with my sister and her family. “Oh, cool. Well, why don’t you let them be for a while and come over and bring me a bowl of gumbo?”

Not “Hey, let’s hang out for a bit while you’re in town.” No, of course not. He wanted me to get on the road and bring him food.

My sister, overhearing this, told me to relay the following message: “Get your ass over here and come eat with us.”

Undaunted, my brother tried again to get me to bring him food. I told him I wasn’t comfortable being on the road, and that I hadn’t slept last night.

His response? “Well, that’s not my fault. Come on man, just bring some food over. I’m not gonna ask again.”

Ohhhhh, THAT pissed me off.

I told him to come over again, since we wanted him to do so.

He then played the guilt card, saying not to worry about it and that he’d eat a ham sandwich for his Christmas dinner. His tone, naturally, was meant to get me to feel bad that I didn’t risk crashing my car just to give him a bowl of gumbo.

…

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?

Oh, that did it. My brother has long been a self-centered asshole. I know this already. But that he was willing to have me get out on the road just to placate this unwillingness to eat something simple?

Screw THAT. My brother and I never get along very well, but after that I don’t particularly care about trying for a while.

Out.

Merry Christmas from Mississippi. Visiting the in-laws for Christmas this year.

This year, I am back in Baton Rouge for Christmas once more. This, in and of itself, is not surprising.

However, I’m not completely free from The Job. For the first time, I’m working for The Job while on vacation in Baton Rouge. As I type this, I have my work laptop sitting next to my MacBook on my sister’s living room table.

Good times…

Eh, it’s not all that bad though. This was my way of getting home, and I still keep in touch with my peeps at the office while I’m away. So, there’s that.

Otherwise, I’m very tired. This weekend was very busy, and I barely got any leep today. Working tonight is gonna BLOW.

Out.

I just ran the Wordpress 2.7 Update through the automatic update tool. Two words: Fast and Seamless.

In December of 2001 I bought my first premium only car.  A Subaru WRX.  911 had happened, the dotcom burst had come and gone and gas prices had been at record lows.  I was able to buy a gallon of gas for the first time in 10 years give or take for under a dollar.  Not only that I was buying premium gas for around .94 cents a gallon. Gas continued to stay low all the way through late 2003 peaking slightly to $1.50 a gallon until 2004 when we started the real upward push of the cost of gas.

In late 2004 I remeber filling up at a Randals and paying just under $2 a gallon and telling my room mate at the time that I couldn’t beleive we’d get much more above $2 gasoline.  Not only that I hated the fact then that it was so high and that I was having to put in premium because of my turbo engine.

Fast forward to October 2006 I decided that I wanted to trade in my Subaru WRX for something a bit larger that still got good gas milage.  I bought my VW Passat.. which… unfortunatly also takes premium.  I will preface the rest by stating the Passat gets much better milage than the Subaru.  The Passat gets about 31MPG on the hwy and 22MPG in town.  The WRX got about 28hwy and 18 city - most of it cause I drove it like it was stolen.

Gas prices were around $2.25 a gallon at that point and I was pretty certain there was no way it was going to get worse.

February 2007 hit and I was paying $3 a gallon.  All the way through 2007 I continued to get stuck with $3+ gasoline and then when I thought I wasn’t going to get screwed any more with having a premium only car, July 2008 came about and I paid $4.25 a gallon.  $70 bucks to fill up my tank.

This week marks the first week that I’ve managed to fill up my car for less than $30, not only that its the first in 5 years that I’ve paid for gas so cheap.  So in thinking about this crazy run over the past 5 years, we’re pulling out of Iraq, things are stablizing, the economy is shot, and crude oil is now at $33 dollars a barrel.  I suspect that if we break the $30 dollar mark we might just see gas prices drop down much closer to a dollar a gallon.  And that my friends is something that I sure as heck didn’t see coming.

That’s right - hard earned tax dollars sent to men who have made poor business decisions.

From CNN:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The federal government will provide $13.4 billion in loans to Detroit automakers, the White House said Friday.

An additional $4 billion may be available in February, the Bush administration said.

“The terms and conditions of the financing provided by the Treasury Department will facilitate restructuring of our domestic auto industry, prevent disorderly bankruptcies during a time of economic difficulty, and protect the taxpayer by ensuring that only financially viable firms receive financing,” according to a statement released by the White House.

The loans are designed to stabilize U.S. automakers through March 2009, at which time the automakers must show they are financially viable.

“If the firms have not attained viability by March 31, 2009, the loan will be called and all funds returned to the Treasury,” the statement says.

Financing will be drawn from the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, it says.

The government will put other conditions on the loans, the statement says, including limits on executive compensation and perks such as corporate jets, the automakers adhering to fuel efficiency and emission standards and opening books to government scrutiny.

This really pisses me off.

Time moves in one direction and one direction only, as far as we can tell, and each second that passes is irretrievable by anything but memory.

Memory is liquid. It ebbs and flows and changes with the movement of celestial bodies, and it’s never perfect. Memories flow around each other, and get combined in swirls. Salman Rushdie wrote that “Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts”. This is how I view memory. So when I relate these things to you, I am only relating them as accurately as I am able, as the truth will always be diluted by the liquid of memory.

Just know that I am not served by keeping the truth from you. Only by giving it all away, will I be able to get any real perspective on this mess.

There are only two things that I will not share with you. The first is her real name. That is for safety reasons. Here name is not Amanda, but her name is close enough to that, that it shouldn’t matter. The second part that I will not discuss is the first time she and I tried to have sex. Although it is a funny story, simply because she and I had no idea what we were doing, and because of the physics involved in the back seat of a subcompact car, both of us got hurt. It’s also private, and I won’t tell that story here.

Amanda and I met in grade school, and we were both pretty much outcasts from the rest of our class. I have always been over weight from an early age, and so was very unpopular. This was in a time before I knew how to stand up for myself and so I got picked on a lot. She was an outcast because she was very nerdy, and bookish, bossy and belligerent with most people. So as the two outcasts of the class we gravitated to one another and became friends.

Now, not many people know this next part about me, but because I am so severely dyslexic I was functionally illiterate until the 7^th grade. I had a few words that I could read, and there were others that I could sound out, but I was still mostly illiterate. But Amanda wasn’t. She read all the time. She would tell me about the stories she had read and (always in a very insulting way) encourage me to try and read more. So I looked up to her, and thought of her as much smarter than I was. This was a though that persisted throughout the first decade that I knew her.

I have just written 6 pages of details about the early part of our relationship, and deleted them. Here is the important part: She got real hot in high school. REAL hot and became very popular. She was out of my league, but her boyfriend dumped her, and she came to me that night, and that started a chain reaction of a relationship.

We dated for a year and a half exclusively. She was punishing, distant and corrosive, but she was letting me sleep with her, and I thought I was in love.

Strike that, I was in love. She wasn’t, but I was. Maybe in her own limited way she was. Honestly I don’t know.

So then she cheated on me in our senior year. I caught the two of them together. I mean I caught them in the middle of it. We were at a party at someone’s house, and I remember thinking that I hadn’t seen my date in a while. So I went looking for her, and I found her. There is a Hindu saying that I came across years latter that says “Do not seek for something you are not willing to find.” Talk about the very definition of finding out something too late.

So anyway, that wasn’t even the really fucked up part. The man she cheated on me with was her older cousin. Yes that’s right, she was sleeping with her cousin. All these years and the part that upsets me the most is not that she betrayed me, but that she did it with her cousin. She tried to make it out as being my fault. She wanted to tell me all the details. But I pushed her away.

She ended up marrying him right after high school because she got pregnant. In the interest of full disclosure, it was her third cousin, but it’s still creepy.

She came to see me right before her wedding. She had miscarried. We spent the night together. That morning she told me: “I’ll see you when I get divorced.”

Before she ever got married, she knew she was getting divorced.

And it is this EXACT moment that has set the tone for our relationship ever since. That’s when we find one another. We find each other before or after major events in our lives. We find each other when one of us is weak, and hurt, and needs a friend. And in that time of weakness we proceed to tear each other apart, eviscerating the others self esteem and destroying our confidence.

She is a disease that lies dormant, flowing through my veins until one day, suddenly, I come out of remission and there she is: a cancer that never completely goes away.

I think of the word Amanda, and it is synonymous with the word Inoperable or Terminal

The last time I went looking for her was after my father died. I just wanted something that felt familiar, and honestly I may have wanted to self destruct a bit also. At one point, after sex, I cried. Between pulls on her cigarette she told me: “If you want to cry, go see a priest. That’s not why I let you in the door tonight.”

All the hateful, spiteful things I’ve said and done to her over the years, all the things she’s done to me, I don’t know if any of them hurt as much as that. But the thought that kept me awake that night was not my pain, but the though that maybe I am just as destructive to her as she is to me. I had never thought of that before. It had never occurred to me that of all the things she had done to me, at least a few of them were deserved because of the way I had treated her.

That made me proud.

As much shame as I feel for that pride, still to this day I take pride in that. That I did not give in and wither in the face of this force of nature, but that I have given as good as I got.

This is not the pride of the kind man I wish to be.

The old saying “That which doesn’t kill you just makes you stronger” is wrong. That which doesn’t kill you just delays the inevitable.

By now we have all heard the term nostalgia described as “the pain from an old wound”. Even though this is inaccurate, it is my favorite definition of the word. Proust, maybe better than anyone, understood this when he wrote “In Search of Lost Time”. It is said that there is no human emotion that Shakespeare did not write about, but that is a lie. He may have written dozens of sonnets about unrequited love, but The Bard never wrote one about reciprocated hatred, combined with the most powerful need…

It is with this in mind that I sit down to write the story of Amanda and me. I have known her now for almost a quarter of a century, and she and I have been intimate, off and on, for close to a decade and a half. In all this time, nothing she has ever done, even one time, has ever led me to believe that she has the smallest bit of affection for me. And yet, every now and again, her life will crash over mine, like a massive wave over a solid cliff face on the shore, eroding it, destroying it slowly, and shaping it at the same time.

It is with no hesitation that I can say I am the man I am today, in no small part, because of the way she has eroded me, and the way I have tried to heal myself.

There are three questions I have to ask myself

The first is if I love her, and the answer is a decided “no”. That much, at least I can see clearly. I did love her once, more so than the air I took into my lungs. But not now.

You can’t love something that has no soul, because something that has no soul is not a person.

The second is what is she to me now? I’m not sure what she is, at all, let alone who she is to me.

The third is the most troubling. I have to ask myself, over and over why she and I are drawn to each other. And this is the question I am most unsure about. Certainly sex has something to do with it. That is always a central focus of our relationship. But not all of it. There is more. It’s like trying to climb a mountain that no one can climb, or stop the movement of the tides with one bare hand.

It just is what it is, and there are no real answers.

In college I took her to dinner. This is after she had cheated on me, and left me for another man, and then come back. It was winterfall, and very pleasant in Louisiana. I took her to a secluded restaurant, no longer open, and we ate on the patio. Emotions with Amanda ran passionately hot, and completely nonexistent with no space in between. That night was a nonexistent night. She ate her food like it was made of cardboard, and never spoke a word. In jest I laughed, and called her “My little wooden girl”, when I couldn’t get any response from her.

She moved faster than I have ever seen anyone move in my life. She stabbed me in the shoulder with her fork. She sat back down and smiled, and went back to eating.

I yelled and I screamed and I flung myself around that patio like an insane bull knocking over everything in my path. She never reacted to it. She just sat there, calmly, eating her risotto with the same fork she had stabbed me with, not even paying attention to the drama I was providing.

When the waiters came outside and threated to call the police, she wiped her mouth, picked up her purse and went to sit in my car.

That night, she told me she loved me, that she should have never cheated on me, that she had been a fool. She whispered sweet, loving things in my ear and made passionate love to me.

10 years later, she has never apologized for stabbing me.

I don’t mean that she has never said the words, although she hasn’t. I mean she has never felt sorry for even a moment for what she did. Honestly I don’t think she has ever felt sorry for anything she has ever done. The truth is that she may never have felt the same emotions you and I feel every day. I will never know.

That lack of emotion, that complete absence of pity, is what presents the challenge. It’s like if I can just get her to feel something, anything, I’ll know she is capable of it. Until the day I know she is capable of emotion, I am afraid that she is capable of absolutely anything.

It’s been two years, more or less, since the last time the waves crashed, and it’s time again.

Last night I saw her again. She was in the same restaurant I was in, and let me tell you, she looked good. She’s a very petite brunet with gray, intense, creepy eyes. She was there with a girl friend and her 4 year old daughter. I was there with the pastor from my church. She couldn’t keep her eyes off of me, and as much as I tried to suppress it, the challenge was there from her: dominate me, possess me, tame me. Of course none of those things are possible.

On my way out the door, I passed her table and wordlessly tossed my business card onto her plate.

Now I know she picked it up. I feel sure that she is going to contact me. She always does; she is as powerless to resist me as I am to resist her.

So in the time I have left I am going to rip it all open. I am going to tell the story and maybe, by the end of it, I can know why I feel what I feel. Maybe by making the old wound ache, I can avoid letting it cripple me this time around.

At the very least, there will be a record if I go missing.