I spent most of the day trying to get the satellite dish to work. I think that I proved to myself how incompetent I am at it by looping the card that I had in what appears to be a somewhat irreparable loop. A loop is when the card has one line that refers to the other. When it happens the card no longer can be written to or work at all. What you are apparently supposed to do is to run the delooping tool and 20 minutes later everything is fine again. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way at all for me. It just goes on trying to glitch the thig forever so I am going to let it go overnight and maybe try another delooping tool tomorrow. I think that I need to make a copy of a subscriber’s card. I can borrow my dad’s card but then I wouldn’t be able to send it around to anyone. I could also just find someone who has a working card and copy it. I wonder if I do know anyone with a working card other than my dad?

Well I was feeling really weird after going out on a date with J. I braved the storm even though dad said that it would be very dangerous to go out in it. The storm wasn’t my problem. I am my problem. I got to her apartment and she had cooked steak tips, potatoes, and salad. After we ate we rushed to the movie and then when we got back I just dropped her off. With Joanna there is never time to end an evening in some romantic way. Actually the real problem is that I don’t know how to end an evening in a romantic way without giving myself a heart attack. So I felt this incredible awkward feeling at the end of the evening when she was leaving my car. She looked at me with an awkward pause and I couldn’t tell if that meant that she was expecting me to let her know if I liked her by reaching over for a kiss. Of course I feel so unsure of myself and the rules and what I should be doing at the end of a date that I just said goodbye and then she walked out. I think that had I done what I really wanted to do I would have invited myself up to her apartment so that neither she nor I would be lonesome tonight. But I didn’t and instead I returned home at 9:30 on a night where I have little to do before I sleep but wonder what is really wrong with me and to feel that loneliness has finally captured me from behind. It surprised me when it came. It was funny because loneliness wasn’t surrounding me until I pulled out of the lot at Joanna’s place. I would think it was totally my fault for why I have trouble connecting with Joanna but maybe two shy people just have a lot of trouble expressing themselves to each other. That’s what I prefer to think. It is a major effort for either person to become extroverted enough to communicate what they feel and want. So for people like me it takes either the perfect person and passion that is so hot it is under extreme pressure or it takes a person who isn’t shy about things. I have been with the ones who aren’t shy so far… even though they were shy people. They just happened to have passion at the time. I really do need to conquer my fears if I ever hope to be who I would like to be. It just is so hard to do!

Anyways. I’ll keep trying all angles. I haven’t even called back Waichi’s friend from the hospital. I can’t expect things to work out if I don’t keep trying. I could call Amanda since she is likely to connect easily with me. At least we have broken the ice with each other physically so that now it isn’t a big deal for us to be physical. I can only think that the reason why it was so easy with her was because she was clear that she liked people to be physical with her and she made a point of inviting me to her apartment and to suggest activities like curling-up to watch DVDs and sitting together on the couch that encourage touching. I think that going out to the theatre and movies is bad for me because I don’t really have a chance to get intimate with the person who I am out with. It is better to watch a DVD at home or to do something that doesn’t have such strict time limits for the beginning and ending. Maybe my next date with Joanna, if she’ll let me take her out again??, will be to go snow tubing in Nashoba Valley. If we did that we would have to be out for most of the day. It still is bad because there is no time at her place or mine at the end of the day built into the date. It requires a lot of planning to make things go well. I wish I wasn’t such a chicken in terms of laying out options for the women who I meet. If I could tell them that I would like to kiss them or just try to kiss them then I would be much happier. That ought to be my goal. To kiss women at the end of dates or at least offer or attempt each time it seems even remotely possible. I am a loser despite knowing the game. If I try I might succeed. If I don’t try I am sure to fail. I felt so lonesome earlier tonight. Writing is very good for my spirits. Even though nobody reads these journal entries; when I write them I feel as though there is someone else with me in the room and that is enough to chase away the loneliness. It is the same with occupations like working through the satellite dish. The devil preys on idle minds. I need to stay active… otherwise I’ll find myself drinking beers and staring at the Window’s Media Player screen image for two to 3 hours while listening to music that has a general them of people being alone or lost. That is enough for now. I’m going to go look for women on the Internet.

Nighttime. Next day.

I spent most of the day at work not working. It was impossible for me to focus on work. I’ve never been so distracted but maybe it is impossible to work when there is nobody in the office at all and there isn’t really anything important that needs to be done. So instead I dreamed all morning about my social life, the satellite, my little world. I had a voicemail from L. It turns out that she was trying to connect with me last week. She called me after I gave her an update via email. She told me that she had gone through some serious trauma in the past few months. She had been dating and pretty much common law married to a 31 year old man. They lived together in a house that they had bought and he was doing full time work while she was taking care of the house. On November 5th she her boyfriend had gone out for a birthday party and apparently was hit by a car and killed. It makes you wonder? Life is so short and yet I am passing it in such trivial ways. If only I could really live that would be an incredible change. If I can’t live I can at least take advantage of my need to communicate and to type by writing stories. Even stories are so difficult for me right now because they require me to focus on something for more than 5 minutes and all that I have is a 5 minute attention span. That’s what I told Liz today. I told her that my attention span was show. She recommended writing lists of things that I wanted to do and I told her that I do that but I just use the list as a launching point to shift minute by minute between the items on the list. The real problem is obvious. There is no longer anything in my life that I feel passionate about. I am not passionate about a woman. I am not passionate about a dream. I am drifting through time and towards death without a direction. I get into conversations with people and I let them know … I just don’t have any stories to tell or things to say. My life has been very boring and I can’t entertain them with who I am. It is all so pitiful. So I suppose I deserve some sympathy or empathy.

That’s what happened at the end of the pub crawl in the South End. I got into a big fight with Heidi, our tour guide through little Ireland. She had mentioned that there were private strip clubs in Boston and I told her that there weren’t any good strip clubs in B oston and that I didn’t even believe her about the private strip clubs. She got a little offended and eventually told me that she felt sorry for me and that she had sympathy. Then she told me when I seemed offended by her comment about sympathy that she felt empathy for me. That was when I got nice and offended and told her that she should be careful with the words that she used because empathy means that she feels what I feel and wan’t appropriate for an insult because it should really only be used when someone actually feels someone elses emotions. At that point she sensed my tension and I told her straight out that I didn’t like to be told that she had sympathy for me and that I thought that she should stop acting condescending to me. That was when she told me that I had been condescending to her. I think the reason why she felt that way was that I had been giving her shit about the gypsy strip clubs in Boston that she apparently claimed had kitchens that she had worked in. Anyways… she walked out and then Robert had to go get her. At the same time we had been trying to negotiate for the fish. She had also been offended when I had said… let’s kill a fish because I had seen the fish in the window of the late night Chinese restaurant. When you are in a Chinese restaurant at 3:00 AM and you have been on a pub crawl in the south end all night I suppose you can get a little jumpy and irritable. So eventually Robert talked her into coming back inside. I would have been entertained if she had walked off seeing as she didn’t have any money on her so she wasn’t about to get far after storming out of the door. Well… it isn’t a good story but at least I got out of the apartment that night!

I’m pretty far from making a valid card. I have kept a log of all of the things that I did in case anything works. For now I have a clean 30 minutes of programming before the card craps out on me. That I can do quite reliably now so it is progress because I know somewhat of what I am looking for when I burn the card in the first place. It needs to be activated, etc. Some BINs need to be cleaned and have HEX files applied before they work. I am not sure if there is any magic combo between BIN and HEX. The real trick seems to be to get a valid BIN file in the first place. My best bet is to copy the one from my dad’s lab or find someone who is a subscriber that I can borrow the card from. There must be someone who has a real card. Well …. I have the new TV getting delivered. I already asked Phillip to send me his BIN so that I have something that can work for long enough for me to watch a movie or TV on the DSS system. It is becoming an obsession for me to get the DSS system pirated and working. I think the reason why I have any passion for it is because it offers me a slow learning experience. It is frustrating but I can pass through each step and learn what I need to do. Each test takes me one point closer to getting a working system. I have this imaginary vision of the Enigma project cracking the code of the Japanese and Germans in WWII and this is my first step towards getting back engaged to being a code cracker. I wish sometimes that I could have been alive at the time of Touring and be able to see the birth of the first computers designed to crack the codes. Collossus. Enigma. I wonder if I really would have been allowed to be a code breaker at that time. I also wonder if with modern computers whether code breaking is back where it was originally. The code makers can make nearly unbreakable code but the code crackers have extremely powerful hardware to use to crack the codes.

I am writing this journal as though it is to someone. I guess that it is to me. I love Windows Media Player and I love the fact that I can touch type and watch it instead of looking at the screen. It means that I can just sit and think through my fingers into the computer and enjoy the sights of the computer. I am going to really enjoy the full screen media player stretched out across my 46 inch TV on Sunday night. I will probably just lie down and watch it and write. I wish sometimes when I see the screen that I had some dope to help me to mellow out and relax. Tonight. I thought about going out but I chained myself inside so that I could learn a little about myself. I wanted to learn how to be alone with myself and to get to sleep without the insomnia taking over me. So far it hasn’t worked all that well. I haven’t tried the sure first tricks for some reason. Those are to read a book. I found a tear rolling down my eye. I don’t know if it was out of sadness or because I had a tear that was in my eye because I was starting so hard at the screen. I may never know. It probably wasn’t anything meaningful. It’s funny that I started writing now that I have been alone for a couple of days. I does make me very happy to be typing at the keyboard again. When I do this I feel like I have found an old friend and that my friend who I haven’t seen for so long is embracing me through my fingers. It could be that I just enjoy the \sense of touch. Because I am so afraid of touching women because I fear how they might react I probably am touch deprived. So when I touch the keys it helps me to satiate my need for touch. That also could explain why I could never really write when a woman is around. It’s not because I can’t write or that they are distracting me. It’s just that they are satiating a basic need for touch. So as long as I stay away from touching women I can write as a way to fulfill some of my basic desires. IF all goes well I will settle in one night from writing a journal to writing a work of fiction. It really won’t be much different to write fiction instead of a journal. I’d almost rather be writing a fantasy than things about my own life. I so often wish that I could drivt into one of my many fantasies. I could just dream a different world with the perfection in me and in my surroundings that I can only imagine. I could create a world that would be a theatre for my dreams and fantasies because the real world is a very difficult theatre to perform in. I am getting tired. I hope my loader found the ATR. If not I’ll have to try some evasive measures.

In the end I’ll need to call today a failure of a day. Why? Because I couldn’t get a valid BIN. I expect the satellite dish receiver to validate my existence each time I try to put the card in to get a stable signal. When it doesn’t it shows how little I know and how much more work I need to do to learn enough to be able to defeat it. That is why I enjoy it so much. It gives me a chance to have a yes or no answer to work that I am doing. It’s not any fuzzy answer like when I am with a woman or when I am at work. Either I have achieved my goal of making a working card or I haven’t and I haven’t achieved that goal yet. I’ll ask my dad tomorrow if I can read his BIN off of his card. I’m tired of writing for tonight. This is still not much of a work given that it is only 4 pages long and it is 2 whole nights of writing in a journal. Well… I think that I can fill quite a few pages if I don’t get carpal tunnel.

Next day Dec 28th – Saturday night

I told J. how shy I am. I don’t know whether she cared or not but I feel better about myself. I let her know that it was and is very hard for me to call her on the phone. She wasn’t sure if I was ever going to call her again since we had gone out on Wednesday night and it was already Saturday and I hadn’t called again. I’ve been consumed with my media projects and the 46” TV. I did manage to go out today by skiing with mom and dad. Dad broke his finger in some weird way. I think he dislocated it. Mack went walking out on the lake. I made a new friend at the hair dressing place. She was cool. I guess she isn’t really my friend because she is just someone who cuts hair but she was a fun to talk to. Anyways… I don’t feel much like writing right now. I’d rather get some rest. Tomorrow is the big Pats game. I did feel weird tonight because it is Saturday night and I am alone. I went alone to the pizza parlor down the street. It was pretty depressing.